'Endeavour' ITV 1

[Once Was 4]

Pretty dreadful storyline in no. 3. Poison-pen letters in a village? Edmund Crispin was sending that up in the 1950s. A vet's humane killer? Peter Lovesey made use of that in Skeleton Hill. (Btw, why has no-one made a Peter Diamond series?)

And the underlying story is now set up for (I suspect) a rather obvious fourth episode.

And - come to think of it - the Clinton reference is reminiscent of the character (and budding politician) Anthony in a Gently episode - "Call me Tony".

So what do you think? Is Fred Thursday getting corrupted or is he craftily infiltrating himself with Box and Co in order to expose them? Is Box's sidekick corrupt or is he playing along to expose his boss (unlikely)?

And interesting: Box is not a totally one-dimensional character. He thinks that he is a 'good copper' and is bitter about the way that his Dad, also a copper, was treated when badly injured on duty.

For me this makes this kind of thing intriguing; if I wanted a good story line I would look elsewhere (I also know, and am distantly related to, a couple of ex coppers who are quite open about 'rotten eggs' who they actually hate more than criminals as "we all get tarred with the same brush!")

[Pabmusic]

A TV adaptation of 'The Moving Toyshop' was broadcast on BBC1 in 1964 as part of the series called 'Detective'. Richard Wordsworth played Gervase Fen.

Most famously, the climax of The Moving Toyshop was bought and filmed by Hitchcock as the ending of Strangers on a Train. Crispin's book had only just been published, too, so it rather scuppered dramatisations.

[subcontrabass]

[COLOR="#0000FF"]I did spot the sly reference to a Rhodes Scholar, name of Clinton...

Apparently a lot of other allusions: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt8700016...ef_=ttcnn_sa_1

[Richard Tarleton]

Apparently a lot of other allusions: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt8700016...ef_=ttcnn_sa_1

I gave a link to the PP Arnold track in #308....great song....(also recorded by Rod Stewart)

[eighthobstruction]

....perhapos they are taking the allusions too far and should spend more time to tighten up plot and script....

[Pabmusic]

....perhapos they are taking the allusions too far and should spend more time to tighten up plot and script....

Yes, I agree. The allusions are sometimes subtle, sometimes signposted, but they are distracting. If the rest of the Morse canon had been like that, perhaps, it would be OK, but since it's not, it emphasises how thin the plot is.

[Pabmusic]

I am half-way through the second of his 'Gervase Fen' books at the moment, recent discovery (tho I heard about him years ago from a friend who was the author's successor as organ scholar at St John's Oxford). Much enjoying the light, ironic touch. Surely ripe for a subtle dramatisation.... Bill Nighy as Fen, perhaps...?
...

Fen does age, since there was a considerable gap between The Long Divorce (1952) and the last book, The Glimpses of the Moon (1972). Interestingly, we are first introduced to him as the Oxford Professor of English Language and Literature in The Case of the Gilded Fly (1945), published the year Tolkien became exactly that. It is said that Kingsley Amis and Philip Larkin both appear in that first book (they were friends).

My own favourites are the short story We Know You're Busy Writing But We Didn't Think You'd Mind If We Just Dropped In For A Minute, and The Glimpses of the Moon. The latter has easily the weakest plot, but it's so incidental to the story that it doesn't matter at all. If you want insights into village life, film composers, SWEB pylons, hunt saboteurs, publishers, then this is the one. Here's the moment Gervase Fen reflects on his 15-year absence:

... Here he paused by the mirror, from which, not unexpectedly, his own face looked out at him. In the fifteen years since his last appearance, he seemed to have changed very little. Peering at his image now, he saw the same tall lean body, the same ruddy, scrubbed-looking, clean-shaven face, the same blue eyes, the same brown hair ineffectually plastered down with water, so that it stood up in a spike at the crown of his head. Somewhere or other he still had his extraordinary hat. Good. At this rate, he felt, might even live to see the day when novelists described their characters by some other device than that of manoeuvring them into examining themselves in mirrors.

[Richard Tarleton]

A belter of a final episode, I thought.

[Keraulophone]

A belter of a final episode, I thought.

Agreed.

I watched the episode two weeks ago with Mrs K who had never seen the programme before. Frankly, she was bored, and thought its pace too slow (one of its aspects that I like) through its two-hours. Had she joined me for last night’s episode, I think she would have been more impressed with the more dramatic storyline and the solid interplay between the main characters. Where is there better acting in a TV drama at present? I once tweeted, with reference to Wolf Hall that “Lesser is Moore”; maybe here, as an example of Slow Television, “Less is Morse”... or would it be the other way around?

[ferneyhoughgeliebte]

A belter of a final episode, I thought.

(SPOILER: Perhaps spoilt just slightly by the rather "pat", "happy ending", where everybody was back to where they were in, say, series 3?Even Morse and Joan Thursday were back to exchanging brief, longing glances.)

[Cockney Sparrow]

Can we hope for an ITV repeat of this series. (Anyone who knows about the probabilities - I'd like to know, please). Or I suppose it might surface on ITV 3 at some future, indeterminate date

I've ended up missing 3 of the 4, and the ITV Hub or whatever its called is almost unuseable - with fast cable internet, it sticks and hangs up far too much

[eighthobstruction]

.....should have been a final scene with Morse shaving his moustache off.....

[eighthobstruction]

....did anybody else think how rather preposterouis it would be transporting sand from Pembrokeshire to Oxford in the 60's on tiny tiny roads (before most motorways)in tiny lorries....rather than using perfectly ok local aggregates (probably). It is the cement, haulage, machinery and manpoower which are the expensive things in concrete; not aggregates which are cheap and abundant....a great deal of so called 'concrete cancer' was caused by concrete contractors adding too much cement thinking themselves doing the contractor a favour giving a rich mix....banal but....

[Richard Tarleton]

....did anybody else think how rather preposterouis it would be transporting sand from Pembrokeshire to Oxford in the 60's on tiny tiny roads (before most motorways)in tiny lorries....rather than using perfectly ok local aggregates (probably). It is the cement, haulage, machinery and manpoower which are the expensive things in concrete; not aggregates which are cheap and abundant....a great deal of so called 'concrete cancer' was caused by concrete contractors adding too much cement thinking themselves doing the contractor a favour giving a rich mix....banal but....

Well - Swansea (a pedant writes) but yes, good point. It's bad enough getting to Oxford now, even with the M4....and given that Llanelli sand is extensively used for construction and infrastructure today I hope the local sand contractors weren't watching, as aspersions were cast on their product...

I did send a lorry load of sand from Pembrokeshire to London in 2008, when they were filming the penultimate Harry Potter movie, part of which was shot on the beach and dunes here....the art dept in Pinewood Studios wanted some to see how it behaved when wet, or blown about. They sent a lorry, we laid on a digger.....

[johncorrigan]

...and the solid interplay between the main characters. Where is there better acting in a TV drama at present?

Nowhere that I can think of. That's what I love best about it...great acting...the scene where Bright gets mobbed by excited kids was a gem.