ON SET WITH... Roger Allam

as Brigadier Roger, 63, recently seen as DI Fred Stone in The Missing, stars

Morse Thursday in ITV’s Inspector he takes us prequel Endeavour. Here fourth series behind the scenes on the in London, of the show, which is filmed

Oxford and the Home Counties...

4 MONDAY

This new series is about Endeavour and Thursday solving crimes of course, but it’s also about the pair coming to terms with the departure of Thursday’s daughter Joan, who Endeavour had grown close to. Thursday and his wife Win are trying to deal with her absence in different ways, and in today’s scenes there’s a sense of loss underlying what’s being said, or what’s not being said. The interior of the Thursdays’ house, which has a radiogram and just one TV, takes me back to the simpler life of the 1960s.

5 TUESDAY

We’re filming at a hospital in north London today, an unused part of which has been dressed to look like Cowley General Hospital in Oxford. The production team has created a ward that looks exactly as it would have in the 1960s, complete with magazines such as Soccer Star, Town and Punch. This episode, called Lazaretto, concerns the activities of the doctors and nurses here, and gives me the biggest challenge of the series so far: I have to chase a suspect down a long corridor, which is hard work!

6 WEDNESDAY

Scenes with Shaun Evans today, who plays Endeavour, and the famous Morse Jaguar [right]. The vehicle looks beautiful but it’s horrible to drive. The gears are so loose compared with a modern car, the wing mirrors seem miles away and you can’t see anything behind you because the rear window’s so small.

7 THURSDAY

We’re back in the hospital for more scenes today, but the location is proving logistically tricky to reach. Liz, the woman who does my make-up, got caught up in traffic on the M25 and it took her four hours to get here. Oxford itself presents challenges of a different kind. Filming there, especially at the height of summer, is tricky because of the crowds, and another problem is the amount of signage we have to cover up before we can film a drama that’s set in the 1960s. So we try to limit how many scenes we shoot there.

8 FRIDAY

Thursday’s smoking his pipe in today’s scenes. But if you look carefully you’ll notice I tend not to light up until we get towards the end of the scene. I don’t like to puff away for too long as it leaves a rather unpleasant taste in my mouth. Like the Jaguar, the pipe is lovely but the experience of smoking does tend to leave your mouth feeling like an old ashtray – and I say that as a former smoker. We tend to use herbal tobacco for the most part on Endeavour, and occasionally we use the real thing, but they’re both equally disgusting.