Prepare to say farewell to Detective Sergeant Morse
‘It’s a bit like planning your own funeral, really,” is how Russell Lewis, the writer of Endeavour, described working on the final series. Because this is the end: three episodes and then the show wraps up for good. We know, obviously, that Morse will carry on policing for a very long time to come. But what about Fred Thursday? If they dare let anything bad happen to him, I’ll be protesting outside ITV.
The murder cases in Endeavour
have never been the point. Sometimes you’ll get a memorable one, and enjoy putting all the clues together, but others are just going through the motions. No, the appeal of Endeavour
is in the central performances of Shaun Evans as Morse and Roger Allam as Thursday, plus regular supporting players such as Anton Lesser as their chief superintendent.
That, and the period detail: the clothes and the furnishings; the department store where sales are logged by hand in a ledger; the sandwiches wrapped in greaseproof paper. The Thursdays’ home is what I love most: the wallpaper, the lampshades, those little wooden deer ornaments that I remember from my grandma’s mantelpiece.
This final series has been written to reward long-term fans, with references to past cases thrown in. A character
we haven’t seen for a few seasons made an unexpected return. Morse seems restored after unravelling in the last series. But there was also a new string of murders to solve. Two deaths were linked to the Oxford Concert Orchestra, a subject which not only played into Morse’s passion for classical music but meant that we got a dramatic soundtrack thrown in.
It wasn’t a classic mystery. The killer was quite easy to spot – it’s always the ones you least expect – and in some cases it was difficult to tell if the characters were being cagey or the actors were being stagey. There is often a divide in Endeavour between the lead characters, who have emotional depth and complexity, and the ones who are only here for one episode and are often caricatures. Here we had a bullying conductor and his protégée, a bitchy orchestra leader, and a pretentious musician drawling: “Wouldn’t know, old cock. Not my cup of lapsang.” One of the murders was carried out by a method that could have been plucked straight from an episode of Midsomer Murders.
Some other, more serious plot strands will carry forward into the last two episodes. Fingers crossed that Thursday will then take up a new job that sets him on the way to a decent pension and a happy retirement.
An admission: the words “German-language drama” and “Hitler” didn’t fill me with the joys of spring. But how wrong I was to pre-judge Faking Hitler (Channel 4). Against all my expectations, it turned out to be tremendous fun. It’s the story of the Hitler diaries, in which Germany’s Stern magazine – and newspapers across the world, including our own Sunday Times – were taken in by a sensational hoax.
The six-part series follows the two main players: Gerd Heidemann (Lars Eidinger), an unlikeable journalist in search of his next great scoop; and Konrad Kujau (Moritz Bleibtreu), a small-time forger who finds himself on a runaway train after Heidemann gets wind of the fake diaries he is trying to flog to a Nazi memorabilia collector.
It’s all done with a lightness of touch and a loving attention to the 1980s period detail. At times, you may wonder if the tone is too affectionate – contemporary reports suggested that Kujau was a Nazi sympathiser, whereas here he’s played for laughs – but the real-life story undeniably tipped into farce. Kujau was producing the diaries on the fly using the most basic materials and a very active imagination. “A New Year’s greeting to Mussolini?” says his girlfriend, looking at one of the pages he’s knocking up. “Yes. And there’s one for Franco in the oven,” replies Kujau, because that’s where he ages the paper.
A disclaimer at the end stresses that this is a “free interpretation of historical events” and certainly some elements have been changed. But the show does explain how everyone else was taken in – essentially, the diaries were purchased for millions without anyone in a position of power at Stern, or any other publication, having seen them.
It is also a study, albeit quite a superficial one, of how Germany dealt with its past, 40 years after the war. Some at Stern express revulsion at the idea of publishing the diaries, which present Hitler in a sympathetic light. But Heidemann’s colleagues also seem fine with the fact that he bought Hermann Goering’s yacht and dated Goering’s daughter. The story is interesting on many levels.
Endeavour Faking Hitler