Endeavour
Sunday, ITV
Hull’s Headscarf Heroes
Monday, BBC4
Rating: 
The Inspector Morse prequel, Endeavour, returned this week for a fifth series starring Shaun Evans as young Morse, who is already an opera lover, crossword lover, beer lover and also, it would seem, a proto-feminist.
The new young detective constable, George Fancy, had taken a liking to PC Trewlove, whom he described as ‘crumpet’, but Morse was not having that. Her looks, he said sternly, ‘have nothing to do with it’.
I would have felt more confident about that had the writer, Russell Lewis, actually given Trewlove anything to do across the two hours, bar standing outside murder scenes with her little handbag.
This may well reflect the sexism of the time, but she is still a character in a major TV show and deserves to be written as much as anyone else. Perhaps Trewlove could one day get together with McMafia’s Rebecca and they could have a grumble?
Pictured: SHAUN EVANS as Dectective Sergeant Endeavour Morse ad ROGER ALLAM as Detective Chief Inspector Fred Thursday
The series is still (she admits, grudgingly) solidly made, yet we’ve now got to 1968 and I am beginning to think some of the time and attention so obviously lavished on the nostalgia – the cars, the telephone exchanges – could have been devoted to the plot, which was over-complicated and involved a vast number of characters.
A former boxer was shot and then had a metal spike hammered into his ear. A history don had been killed and stabbed in the eyes with a steak knife. Another Oxford don was decapitated.
Plus, there was the MacGuffin (a Fabergé egg), an artist, an art dealer, a pimp, a stripper, a widow, other dons and a prostitute asking Morse if he likes to be mothered and whether he wanted her to ‘wash’ his ‘tinkle’. (He did not. Maybe he had washed it just that morning?)
It is old-fashioned storytelling – Morse can often discover stuff just by staring at something very hard, quite like Vera from Vera – but this time out, the references were modern, with the narrative exposing a Bullingdon-style club that had committed lewd acts with a pig’s head, and then gone further by gang-raping a waitress.
All the murders were committed by the waitress, as an act of revenge, with the methods taken from classical paintings – and it was preposterous.
Would she, for instance, return to where the rape had taken place to steal that steak knife? Was she thinking: I better had or I won’t leave a major clue?
It was, yes, rape again but, fair play, at least the woman had some comeback, which is a novelty. Meanwhile, the star of the whole shebang is, surely, Roger Allam’s Thursday, who gets to say lines like: ‘I’ll have your cobblers for my key fob.’ If you are to be given lines, then that’s quite a good one to get.
The documentary Hull’s Headscarf Heroes was also about 1968, but there was no soft-edged, romantic nostalgia. Instead, it was archive footage of Hull’s trawlermen going out to sea with scant safety equipment and no radio operators as waves crashed and the build-up of ice meant the boat could ‘turn turtle’ at any moment.
Indeed, at the beginning of ’68, three boats sank in as many weeks, killing 58 men. One wife was only 17 when her 19-year-old husband didn’t come back. And, interviewed today, she is still entirely haunted: ‘Did he call for me, his mum, the bairns? God, I hope it was quick.’
People like to joke about ’elf and safety, but for heaven’s sake. Something had to be done, and the women of Hessle Road – where most of Hull’s fishing families lived – did it.
Their campaign for safer fishing was led by Lillian Bilocca with her astonishing beehive, for whom the word ‘indomitable’ was likely invented. At one point she was shown having to be restrained by police trying to stop her throwing herself at the boat leaving with no radio operator.
She was joined by other women, including Yvonne Blenkinsop (still alive, and interviewed), and together they petitioned, held meetings, campaigned, even though it meant being ‘punched in the face’ by those men who thought this was not women’s business, and even though it meant taking on the rampant misogyny of, for example, Michael Burton, chairman of the Hull Vessel Owners’ Association, who was shown saying: ‘The sooner we get down to the men who matter, rather than the women, the better.’
Yet these women would not be intimidated, made it to Downing Street and won a checklist of 88 new safety measures that were then implemented.
This was a moving, affecting and fitting tribute that also showed how women can be strong and complex, whatever the era. Personally, I’d have liked to know a bit more about Lillian whose funeral, we were told, attracted almost no mourners. Why?
Next week, the finale of McMafia. Will Alex Godman triumph? My own hope is that he’ll be sent to prison, where a sad final shot will show him weaving baskets. In this way, series two, McRafia, will be in the bag. (Sorry. It’s been a long day.)