TV and radio are are little boxes full of many kinds of friends: informative friends, entertaining friends, distracting friends, friends who just won’t shut up and go away. In our semi-regular TV re-watch feature, we take this metaphor and chases it into the ground with deadly intent.
It’s 1965, and Detective Constable Endeavour Morse (Shaun Evans) is seconded to a murder investigation in Oxford, a town he hasn’t been back to since he dropped out of the University. Once there he falls under the grumpy wing of D.I. Fred Thursday (Roger Allam), who is impressed with Morse’s arcane knowledge, analytical intelligence and dogged pursuit of justice. Together they set about investigating a series of swinging mysteries among the screaming spires.
Endeavour is the prequel to the classic ‘80s/‘90s Oxford-set detective show Inspector Morse (ITV, 1987-2000). The grumpy old loner of the original series was so embarrassed about his first name that he refused to tell anyone what it was, but this prequel sticks it right there in the title. Finally, it promises, we’ll solve the mystery of Morse.
The problem is that there isn’t much of a mystery there. We know exactly where we’re going. We’ve already met the fully-formed character ‘Morse’; he was played to perfection by John Thaw nearly 40 years ago. We know how his career has gone (so-so), where he lives (Oxford!), roughly how many friends he has (none), how he relates to women and colleagues (badly), how often he has sex (reasonably often, with a host of British ‘80s TV stars), and what music he listens to (opera!). We know what the finished apple cart looks like; there can be no events in the young Morse’s life that fundamentally upset it. Morse is not going to suddenly lose a limb or gain a wife; there can be no astonishing developments.
It is also absolutely necessary that we do get the expected developments. We need to know how he got the limp and the Jag, and why there’s no Mrs Morse; we’re interested in the provenance of his co-dependency with nice young Sergeant Lewis. We demand to see Morse becoming increasingly Morseful.
Given these limits, Endeavour contents itself with the mildly unexpected, the generally unimpactful, and - at times - the absolutely deranged. It does most of this using a formula you will be familiar with if you’ve ever watched TV. At the beginning of each episode we are introduced to a group of apparently unconnected characters, one of whom is about to become a corpse. Morse then puts his special skills - in his case, the cruciverbalist and the cryptographic - to work, coming up with ever more abstruse theories as the bodies pile up around him, a tally of his bad guesses in mortuary form.
Then, with about ten minutes to go - and this is where we depart a little from the formula - the script writers of Endeavour throw a final, loopy curveball: the dead man turns out to be his own identical twin, or the serial killer turns out to be an actual tiger.
Some detective series, including the original Morse, try to enlist the viewer in the police force; they challenge us to solve the mystery before the sleuth. Endeavour absolves us of that duty. You will never be able to guess the ending, because the solution is going to be far more unhinged than you could ever have imagined.
With this in mind, you can just sit back and enjoy the scenery. And what scenery it is. These delightful plots rise from an entertaining project: the construction of a fantasy 1960s. As Sellar and Yeatman point out in 1066 And All That (1930), ‘History… is what you can remember. All other history defeats itself’. Endeavour is a kind of ‘1966 And All That’, little repurposed scraps of a collective folk memory of the ‘60s. That tiger, for example, is a repurposing of the extraordinary story of Christian the Lion, who was bought from Harrods in 1969 by John Rendall and ‘Ace’ Bourke and taken for walks in the Moravian graveyard just off the King’s Road. There’s a version of media prude and morality arbiter Mary Whitehouse, called, splendidly, ‘Joy Pettybon’ (Russell Lewis, the writer, has a real gift for Dickensian names). There’s a half-remembered version of the famous Rolling Stones drugs bust of 1967, featuring a fictional band called ‘The Wildwood’ (an appropriately Kenneth Grahame reference to equal Pink Floyd’s Piper at the Gates of Dawn). There’s a whole subplot featuring Joan - the daughter of Roger Allam’s Inspector Thursday - that’s just a dramatisation of The Beatles’ ‘She’s Leaving Home’.
There are ‘race riots’ and the British space programme, nuclear threats and hippy communes. One episode set in a remote village appears to be a restaging of The Wicker Man (1973), while another set in a public swimming baths is a version of Deep End (1970). It is the ‘60s summarised and, largely, expurgated. There are some racists, but they turn out to be actual Nazis (a Unity Mitford avatar called Charity Mudford), not regular series characters. There are some sexists, but they’re bent coppers, not our coppers. No one ‘falls down stairs’ at the nick and the female victims are rarely ‘interfered with’, as Superintendent Bright tends to put it. Everyone is largely decent and if they’re not - well, they’ve probably done some murdering.
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What kind of friend is it?
It’s more of a relative than a friend. Roger Allam, in his hat and slightly-too-tight single-breasted suit, being genially gruff around the corner of his pipe, insistently and reassuringly reminds me of my maternal grandfather. All he needs is a pair of horn-rimmed glasses and I could be back on the carpet in the sitting room of their house, not that far from Oxford in fact, sitting in front of the TV waiting for The World About Us to begin.
Because this is what Endeavour is: Sunday evening viewing par excellence. It has been a long week and a long day; there has been a big family gathering and a big family meal, with a big row about politics and then a little one about washing up. All anyone wants is something undemanding, something cosy to lull them until bedtime, one final rest before another bloody working week.
In June 1965 - the month in which the pilot of Endeavour was set - Sunday evenings on BBC1 meant Dr Finlay’s Casebook, a drama set around a small GP practice in Scotland. In January 1987 - when Inspector Morse premiered on ITV - Sunday evenings meant the Yorkshire-based sitcom Last of the Summer Wine and, of course, Joan Hickson as Miss Marple. Soapy medical dramas, humorous rural antics and cosy murder. Nothing too demanding, nothing too flashy. This is the sort of thing that gets called a ‘guilty pleasure’, which is as grindingly Protestant a phrase as one could imagine. It is only surprising in that it suggests that there may be pleasures about which we need not feel guilty. Of course, what it means to imply is that we ought to find pleasure in the unpleasant and difficult, in gritty ‘realistic’ portrayals of the everyday misery of malfunctioning men, and crunchy documentaries about challenging moral conundrums. As if we ought to feel guilty about snatching an hour or two of gentle entertainment to distract ourselves from our own everyday miseries and moral challenges.
Endeavour, with its logic-defying plots and its drowsy recollections of the ‘60s like the murmurings of a grandfather about to snooze in an armchair, makes for perfect easy viewing. But it has one other, splendid feature…
Why do you watch it?
In the episode I mentioned earlier about the municipal swimming pool, Morse is questioning the staff about the body found floating in the deep end. But, protests, the receptionist, it's not as if it happens often: ‘In 1964, no one died. In 1965, no one died. In 1966, one person died. I mean, I could go on.’ At which point there was general jubilation in The Metropolitan household, because we recognised the reference immediately: Steve Coogan’s tedious little security guard from the spoof documentary ‘The Pool’ as featured in the spoof news programme The Day Today (1994).
Endeavour is full of this sort of thing. It doesn’t only have references to ‘60s ephemera like Christian the Lion; it also sneaks in very specific winks to weird little pieces of pop culture. Once you start noticing them, they’re everywhere. In the episode with the Nazis and the knock-off Mitford, there is an off-screen character called Roderick Spode, the name of P. G. Wodehouse’s knock-off Moseley in the Wooster stories. Another episode features a stolen case of ‘Killoran’ whiskey, named for the island in Powell and Pressburger’s classic film I Know Where I’m Going! (1945). An artist’s landlady is called Mrs Cravatt, named for Irene Handl’s character in Tony Hancock’s The Rebel (1961). There’s a Soho door marked ‘Raymond Duck, Theatrical Agent’, Uncle Monty’s agent from Withnail & I (1988).
What Endeavour has done is replace the traditional murder mystery game of whodunnit with a far more congenial and Sunday-suitable game: spot the glancing reference. Every episode has a joyful little gem hidden inside it, reassuring you that Russell Lewis - and, indeed, the whole team behind the show - know exactly what they’re up to. You are in safe hands; a whole bunch of skilled TV professionals have invented a lunatic pastime, just for you.
Put the kettle on, there’s time for another episode before bed. Wait, did that friend of the dead scientist just say that this breakthrough chess computer was coded in a programming language called ‘FORBIN’? That’s a reference to Colossus: The Forbin Project (1970). One point to me, I think.
We’ve discussed Morse’s future in the past, as well as The Day Today and Prime Suspect, when write about the original ‘80s TV series:
I love these little Easter eggs - but loved the large one when Morse pays a visit to the actual Crossroads Motel. The sign outside was spot on as I recall.
I have never noticed any of these references. I am clearly not well-versed enough in obscure pop culture. I do rather like the added “Where’s Wally” element it brings to the programme though.