Solved! The mystery of why Morse never rose to the top
Some programmes demand a widescreen telly the size of a pingpong table, filling a wall. So big that if you open the curtains the neighbours in the next street could see what you’re watching.
The pleasure of endeavour (ITV) is the opposite. This period crime drama, not merely set but immersed in the Sixties, deserves to be viewed through a jeweller’s eyeglass, the better to enjoy the precision mechanism of its plots. every whirring cog meshes perfectly with all the other spinning parts.
As the series returned, its lead characters had been demoted and dispersed, following catastrophic mistakes in their last investigation. morse (Shaun evans) has been kicked out of CID and left to rot in a country police-house as a uniformed sergeant, investigating rural mundanities: a stolen collection of silver snuffboxes, a drug addict dossing in church doorway, a missing horse.
How satisfying that these trifles all had a crucial bearing on a much bigger case, the disappearance of a ten-year-old girl. even the registration number of the panda car driven by the opera-loving policeman had a secret relevance: 264 HZ is the frequency of middle C.
The connections didn’t stop there. For nearly 30 years, fans of John Thaw as Inspector morse have wondered why their hero was not a more senior detective. His boss, Superintendent Strange, wasn’t half the copper that morse was, even when steeped in real ale. Surely his preference for the pub over the Freemasons’ lodge couldn’t have cost him that dear?
Now we know. morse’s career was hamstrung when he was cast out of the plain-clothes division. Strange (Sean Rigby) was censured, too, but managed to wangle himself a desk job.
Chief Supt Bright (Anton Lesser) was sidelined into traffic policing, where he made road safety films for children . . . accompanied by a pelican on a leash. What seemed like a touch of humour turned out once again to have a direct relevance to the solution of the case.
And what of DCI Fred Thursday (Roger Allam), the dependable copper’s copper? He’s now suffering a double humiliation — too hard-up to retire, too old to be playing the sidekick to his new boss...swaggering Jack-the-lad DCI Ronnie Box (Simon Harrison). Without uttering a word of complaint, Allam conveyed how intensely Thursday despises the man he has become. Self-contempt was in every little word, never more than when he tried to sound jolly and sympathetic with his wife: ‘Cup of tea, love?’
As if all this wasn’t good enough, we were treated to a marvellous collage of images crystallising life in Britain in 1969, the innocent alongside the disintegrating: children skipping in the playground while junkies dealt heroin in the park.
That was the year a persistent pop hopeful who changed his name from Davy Jones recorded Space oddity, the song that defined his career. David Bowie: Finding Fame (BBC2) traced his repeated efforts to break into the charts, with years of failed attempts at R&B, music hall, children’s ditties and mime . . . not to mention a dire heavy rock album after his Top Five hit.
This was the third featurelength documentary on Bowie from director Francis Whately, after trenchant accounts of his zenith and his decline.
Unfortunately, it couldn’t face the plain fact that, until major Tom went floating in his tin can, I believe that just about all Bowie’s output was dross.
It also failed to interview Bowie’s wife, Angie, who helped invent the Ziggy Stardust look. She’s not exactly a recluse — she did Celebrity Big Brother the week Bowie died in 2016. So why ignore her?