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I would like to say a huge thank you to those who have become Patrons of the site and also a huge thank you to those who have made donations. What do I mean by Patrons?

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Hello everyone and welcome to a new post.

Below is an article from The Times newspaper online. It is behind a paywall but since I subscribe here it is in its entirety.

Ben Dowell Wednesday February 15 2023, 12.01am, The Times.

The end of Endeavour? Perhaps, but we’ve not heard the last of Inspector Morse

As the last instalments of the Inspector Morse prequel air, its writer Russell Lewis and the cast tell Ben Dowell what we can expect from the finale.

There aren’t many ITV crime procedurals with three-act operatic structures, allusions to Philip Larkin and Harold Pinter, and Mozart forming part of the incidental music. But the Inspector Morse prequel Endeavour has always been a cut above the competition.

The Oxford setting helps, but the personality of the classical music-loving classicist created by Colin Dexter, the detective with a fondness for crosswords, Scotch and foamy ale in country pubs, has enjoyed a particularly entertaining lease of life over the past 11 years. And later this month the final three episodes will find Shaun Evans’s hero finally bowing out in an episode with the unashamedly donnish title Exeunt.

It will bring the Endeavour tally to 36 films, a little more than Inspector Morse (33 films between 1987 and 2000) and the Kevin Whately sequel Lewis (also 33 between 2006 and 2015), meaning there will be 102 films in the entire Morse canon. It’s quite an achievement, I tell the scriptwriter Russell Lewis, who has written every episode of Endeavour.

Sean Rigby as DS Jim Strange
ITV

“The grandfather and father did 33 apiece and I didn’t want Colin to be out on 99,” he says with a laugh. “I had to get him to a century and a little bit more. Which is not a bad knock.”

The language of cricket seems an appropriately civilised way to describe the achievement of a series that has stayed true to Dexter’s vision but played beautifully and boldly with the character and the detective genre. One episode in 2018 had Morse visit a recreated Crossroads Motel and we have also enjoyed an episode where a tiger was a murder weapon, a ghost story set in a girls’ boarding school and a series set in Venice that was structured like an opera. Eagle-eyed viewers have also noticed Rhodes scholar Bill Clinton entering one story, as well as a Kate Bush lyric.

Lewis’s fondness for cultural, social and literary allusions and musical motifs are not what viewers of the nation’s premier commercial channel ordinarily expect. Lewis once peppered an episode with a reference to Philip Larkin’s grimly elegiac 1962 poem Sunny Prestatyn, about a poster of a young woman advertising the resort that became festooned with crude graffiti until it disappeared. The poster popped up in various Endeavour shots until it was, as in Larkin’s poem, replaced with one saying “Fight Cancer”.

Larkin is a particular favourite, it seems. The poet is referenced from the off when Endeavour is shown his digs and the landlady tells him, “This was Mr Bleaney’s room. He stayed the whole time he was at the Bodleian,” a near-quote from Larkin’s Mr Bleaney. Two other guests, a Mr Goldberg and a Mr McCann, shared their names with the two sinister strangers from Harold Pinter’s play The Birthday Party. These inclusions aren’t examples of writerly showing off; they carefully set the tone of a series that is alive to — and deeply fond of — the nation’s culture.

“When we started Endeavour it was 1965 and we still had one foot in the 1950s,” Lewis adds. “And if you’ve got one foot in the 1950s, you’ve got one foot in the 1940s. That L-Shaped Room and boarding house reference to The Birthday Party was kind of our early English, desperate vernacular. That was our backdrop.”

Grimy digs aside, Endeavour Morse, with his smart suits and even smarter brain, was the coming man of the 1960s, although one senses that Beatlemania passed him by (he’s more of a Brahms and Beethoven man). His boss, the fabulously straight-up Fred Thursday, played by Roger Allam, has been a lovely emblem of old-fashioned decency. Thursday fought in the war and, like many of that generation, detests violence and wants a secure life for his family and community. And he comes replete with an array of delicious phrases like, “I’ll have your cobblers for a key fob,” “There’s more under my hat than nits,” “Look after your shoes, your shoes will look after you,” and my personal favourite, “Mind how you go.”

The Oxford scenery hasn’t changed much since the Middle Ages, but the way social changes pump through this series was always one of the main attractions for executive producer Damien Timmer who, like all the principal actors, has been with Endeavour from the off.

Sara Vickers as Joan Thursday in Endeavour ITV/SHUTTERSTOCK

“The Endeavour world has always been in flux,” he says. “It never feels like it is caught in aspic. It’s always kind of got forward momentum because there’s always something else around the corner that’s going to shape our characters.”

And while we have known that Endeavour is going to survive and become John Thaw — and that DS Strange will become Endeavour’s boss, played by James Grout in Inspector Morse — there was an array of characters to play with and enough jeopardy. Before the final three episodes the principal question for fans surrounds Thursday’s daughter, Joan, and Morse’s secret love for her. John Thaw’s Morse never had much luck with the ladies, but this series has been able to explore why that is. And the finale resolves their story beautifully as well.

Burial is a leitmotif of this final run of three episodes, with a plotline that takes us back to the Blenheim Vale children’s home where (as fans will know) the bodies of abused pupils were literally buried amid a police and establishment cover-up that still needs solving. As well as echoing real stories in British history, it also tallies with Morse’s own interment of his romantic longing, I suggest to Shaun Evans.

“I think that’s a really interesting way to think about it,” the 42-year-old Liverpudlian says after a thoughtful pause. “[Morse’s] mum died when he was a youngster. I think all these problems grow from burying that and not being able to talk about it. Disinterring [those feelings], I think that’s the source of his discord with women more generally.”

That this show has such a clear and sure vision is achieved principally because Lewis has created every episode. Large-scale long-running shows like this usually share the writing load, but this has a singular flavour and momentum. So much so that Lewis had already envisaged a key scene from the final episode in his head before the first one was filmed. When you see it you will understand why.

“For us it was really wonderful because [with] a lot of TV you’re flying by the seat of your pants; you’re making it up as you go along,” Timmer adds. “Endeavour has always had a kind of clarity of purpose.”

It’s the reason that the cast have stayed so loyal to it, says the executive: big names like Allam and Anton Lesser (who plays Chief Superintendent Bright) have returned year after year. They’re a singular bunch too and, when you talk to them, clearly very close. Evans describes Allam as “one of the most hilarious, magnificent human beings” he knows. Allam in turn said his friendship with his co-star was the experience he would treasure most from his time on the show. For everyone, Endeavour has been an example of what television can do, and it’s not hyperbole to say this has celebrated the form too.

Shaun Evans as Endeavour and Roger Allam as DI Fred Thursday ITV

Not only has it given an extra lease of life to Dexter’s character, but so many episodes also celebrate the TV of the era. Fans will have recognised a Tony Hancock reference in a briefly glimpsed advertisement for Grimsby Pilchards or the tribute to a certain kind of TV in an episode centred on a 1960s music show. There was Crossroads too. And one of the forthcoming episodes relates to the plot of a fictional 1970s TV detective drama, making the sight of Thursday watching a character who seems to be modelled on him a joy. When one of the episodes he’s watching ends he says nothing, except his trademark “Kettle on?” to his wife, Win (Caroline O’Neill).

“One of the things I’ll miss most is just as we’re getting into the early 1970s there are so many things that I’d have loved to have done, but we just, you know, ran out of road,” Lewis says with a sigh. The show, it seems, had to end because the Endeavour and Joan saga had to reach a conclusion, and the cast weren’t getting any younger.

“There comes a point, doesn’t there?” Lewis says. “Rog certainly had never envisioned staying with something for ten years or more. And Shaun started it when he was relatively young. And you only get one life, don’t you? So there’s many other things he wants to do, I’m sure.”

I won’t be spoiling anything by saying that the final episodes are near perfect and all the plot strands are beautifully tied up. And they were emotional to shoot too.

One outdoor scene, which appears at the end, had the crowds that usually gather for Endeavour filming days bursting into applause. The moment moved Evans, and the closing scenes also found Allam getting emotional, which slightly surprised me. In the flesh he seems so urbane and dry.

“Oh, I cry easily,” Allam says with a smile. “I’m like a duck. It all looks calm on the surface. It was very moving throughout in a way because we knew there would be a time when we were never going to do anything in that set again and the set was broken up, and I’d never do anything with Caroline O’Neill again or Anton Lesser or with any of the regulars.”

Evans, who has carried the series more than anyone on screen, is surprised at how sanguine he now feels.

“I thought there would be [sadness] but there’s not. I don’t know, I can’t explain it. It actually feels really good, because it’s completed. And to bring it to a close is a different thing to having it closed for you. And that is very pleasing. I just feel like the story has been told.

“Everything has to come to an end. It’s time. And one of the great things is that we’ve managed to maintain the cast. It’s the same core cast really; we’re all there at the end. That can’t go on for ever. And, equally, you always have to have a beginning, middle and end.”

Evans, who was given one of Morse’s suits (though sadly not the Jag) is off to make an ITV four-parter, while Allam (who was also allowed a suit and one of his character’s fancier hats) is doing a play with Ian McKellen. And Lewis, for whom the show has been his entire life for the past 11-and-a-bit years, is going to take a long and well-deserved break.

“I’m really just not in that headspace at the minute,” he says. “It’s going to be very weird, summer rolling around and not going up to Oxford. So that’s going to be a change. But otherwise it’s seven days a week, 52 weeks a year, really, when we’re making it [or] planning on making it. And that’s been the case for more than a decade. So I’ve just got to take some time out really. Time off for good behaviour now, I think.”

Could there — whisper it — be another return to the Morse universe some time in the future? Maybe there’s a son or daughter of Morse who could take on a detecting role one day? Allam (I think half-jokingly) suggests that he would consider a Thursday prequel if the money was right and it was set “somewhere really lovely”, but Timmer, who may have half an eye on producing something himself, senses that this won’t be the end of the Morse trail.

“The world that Colin Dexter created has been such a big thing for ITV over the years . . . I’m sure there’ll be more,” Timmer says. “There are no secret plans but I can’t believe there won’t be another.”

But the main man is definitely saying goodbye for good. “I feel like my work in the Endeavour universe is done,” Evans says. “For our iteration of the story there is no Endeavour without Thursday and the Thursday family and all those guys. I don’t feel like I’ve got anything else to say about it or to offer. It’s a team thing.”

It sure is. Mind how you go.
The final three-part series of Endeavour begins on ITV1 on February 26 at 8pm. A documentary, Morse & the Last Endeavour, will also profile the character’s world.

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PLEASE TAKE TIME TO READ THE FOLLOWING INFORMATION BEFORE SCROLLING TO THE POST.

Please subscribe to to my website. Subscribing to this website can be done in two ways.

If you have a WordPress account then click the ‘following’ button. If you don’t have a WordPress account then enter your email and click the subscribe button. Entering the email only means subscribing to my website you will NOT be creating a WordPress account. (WordPress are the company that I pay to use their platform).

To help run my website I have set up a Paypal account for donations. Thank you to all those who have made donations.

If you do not use Paypal you can donate via cheque. Please send a message through my website (there is a ‘contact me’ option at the top of the front page) and I will send you my address. Thank you.

My Twitter, https://twitter.com/Jag248RPA?lang=en-gb

My Twitch Channel; https://www.twitch.tv/morselewisendeavour

My Youtube Channel, https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCjIIGCcVpSIFwtRlS8hKWDA?view_as=subscriber

I have started my own Facebook page. It is primarily an extension of this website. I decided to start the Facebook page as there has been times when I have an update to a review post or some interesting news or information but it was all to small to make into a full blown post here on my website. So, come and join and keep up-to-date with all that happens in the Morse universe.

My Facebook Page; https://www.facebook.com/groups/1084993125023468/

I would like to say a huge thank you to those who have become Patrons of the site and also a huge thank you to those who have made donations. What do I mean by Patrons?

What is Patreon? Patreon is a membership platform that makes it easy for artists and creators to get paid. It’s a membership platform that provides business tools for creators to run a subscription content service, with ways for artists to build relationships with their subscribers, or “patrons”.

With Patreon you set up how much you wish to pay monthly. There are three tiers, $5, $10 and $15. It’s like paying for a magazine subscription.

Patreon primarily uses Paypal which is easy to join and a safe way to send money. https://www.paypal.com/uk/home

Here is my Patreon account where you can read more about it, https://www.patreon.com/morseandlewisandendeavour

Here is where to find me on Twitch; https://www.twitch.tv/morselewisendeavour