There’s a moment towards the close of the pilot show of Endeavour when Detective Inspector Fred Thursday ponders where his young sidekick will be in 20 years’ time. The then Detective Constable Endeavour Morse glances in the rear view mirror of Thursday’s Jaguar Mark I and the gimlet eyes of John Thaw – who was synonymous with the role of the middle-aged Inspector Morse – stare straight back.
In the same show eagle-eyed viewers will also have spotted Morse’s creator, Colin Dexter, Hitchcock-like, as an extra having a pint and reading his paper in a pub beer garden. And Thaw’s actor daughter Abigail appears as the editor of the Oxford Mail. She is called Dorothea Frazil. Frazil is a kind of slushy ice. D Frazil is a pun on de-ice. In other words, yes, a Thaw.
Shaun Evans, who plays Endeavour Morse in the TV series. In an era of slick box sets and streaming, Endeavour has become appointment TV
With every series of Endeavour – the seventh starts tonight – writer Russell Lewis leaves a trail of breadcrumbs leading fans deeper into the Morse television universe. Dexter’s clever, cantankerous detective appeared first on screen from 1987 to 2000 as Inspector Morse. Next came the spin-off series Lewis (Robbie Lewis, played by Kevin Whately, was Morse’s loyal sergeant) which aired from 2006 to 2015. Endeavour is the prequel. Created in 2012 as a one-off tribute, the elegant period piece has subsequently become a TV phenomenon.
Viewers are riveted by its intricate links to the original but it’s Russell Lewis’s mind-boggling array of references to other books, films and TV shows that have also helped it acquire a cult following. From Jaws to Kate Bush’s Hounds Of Love, The Great Gatsby, Dirty Harry and Terry Pratchett, they are all in there. Ditto The Graduate, Philip Larkin, Die Hard, Harold Pinter, Reservoir Dogs and even the Carry On films. Endless clues and leads and pieces of on-screen puzzles mean there’s more to solve than just the whodunnit of the plot (see below).
‘It was a risk spinning off from Morse,’ admits executive producer Damien Timmer, whose Mammoth Screen is also behind hit series such as Poldark and Victoria. ‘Lots of great shows have prequels. Only Fools And Horses, Last Of The Summer Wine, All Creatures Great And Small… there was even a prequel to Dallas, though it’s hard to get lightning to strike twice.’
Shaun Evans as Endeavour and Roger Allam as Fred Thursday. These three new Endeavour stories will take the prequel’s total to 30
But it has, with Endeavour pulling in some seven million viewers, many of whom turn super-sleuth while the programme is showing. Locating Colin Dexter is a popular challenge. The writer, who died in 2017, has been spotted in Endeavour dining in an Oxford college, in the audience at a piano recital, enjoying the sunshine on a park bench, admiring a museum exhibition and sitting on a bus. If he’s not there in person, his picture will be in the paper, his portrait on a wall, he’s a bust in a don’s office or ‘employee of the month’ pinned up on the noticeboard of an Oxford railway station.
Morse ended at 33 episodes – its season five finale The Remorseful Day, in which Dexter killed off his inspector, drew an audience of almost 13 million. Lewis ended at 33 episodes too, as a tip of the hat to the original. These three new Endeavour stories will take the prequel’s total to 30. Is it likely Mammoth and Russell Lewis will give fans just three more? Such symmetry would be a classic motif in the Morse universe, but the global appetite for Shaun Evans’s young Endeavour, and his fedora-wearing, pipe-smoking gaffer Fred Thursday, played by Roger Allam, would make that a tricky decision.
‘We are commissioned to make another series so it is very likely we will get to 33 or beyond,’ says Timmer. ‘There’s a lot of time left [he means in chronological terms] before Inspector Morse begins, so we do not see 33 as the ceiling.’ Interestingly, both Evans and Allam have suggested the show could end next year, even if, in Evans’s words, ‘it’s like planning your own funeral…’
For now, though, there are three new stories set to delight fans, who come from all four corners of the world to watch Endeavour being filmed and to enjoy tours of Morse locations in Oxford – mostly real-ale pubs, classical music venues, colleges and crime scenes.
Professional cake-maker Julia Atkinson is a super-fan who lives in the city. Back at series two, she started creating a Great British Bake Off-style showstopper as a gift for the cast and crew when they finished filming. Her themed cakes have included a crime scene with a dagger and handcuffs, topped by icing models of Evans and Allam. The series six cake was decorated with moustaches to reflect the – endlessly discussed – ‘Morse-tache’ grown by Evans. The cake for series seven was a replica of the script, which had the city’s Bridge of Sighs on the front and next, she thinks, will be a blood-red velvet cake.
She tries to explain Endeavour’s appeal. ‘It’s like doing a really complicated crossword. All the clues are there, you just have to understand how the setter’s mind works.’ It’s a great analogy, since Morse himself is a crossword fanatic, something he shared with Colin Dexter.
There are three new stories set to delight fans, who come from all four corners of the world to watch Endeavour being filmed and to enjoy tours of Morse locations in Oxford
The author kept a firm grip on his creation. He forbade any reprise of the Eighties and Nineties iteration of Inspector Morse, even adding it as a clause in his will. He didn’t think another actor could inhabit the role as completely as Thaw and consented to Evans’s portrayal of the youthful Endeavour only because there would be no overlap. Then of course he loved it, not least because of Russell Lewis’s homages to later-life Morse.
One of the most obvious came in series four, broadcast in 2017, which coincided with the 30th anniversary of the launch of Inspector Morse. Thaw’s widow Sheila Hancock – the actor died of cancer in 2002 – was invited to appear. ‘She had long been top of our wish list of fantasy casting,’ says Timmer. ‘She played a great cameo, a psychic called Dowsable Chattox who reads Tarot cards, which foretell things about Morse’s destiny. It felt to us like it had great meaning for the show.’
It’s like doing a really complicated crossword. All the clues are there
Endeavour also lays the foundations of Morse’s famous love of classical music, especially opera. In the original, composer Barrington Pheloung’s haunting theme tune contained the detective’s name spelled out in Morse code, and occasionally that of the killer too, not to mention the odd red herring. (Pheloung was another crossword fanatic.)
Endeavour composer Matthew Slater worked with him for many years. ‘Bigger, larger, grander. That’s the mantra I’ve learnt working on Endeavour,’ says Slater. I remember having my head in my hands looking at a few lines of script that indicated an opera was to be written for this forthcoming series. In the end it was turned into over 100 lines of libretto and three acts. That single paragraph became 30 minutes of music, an opera Russell Lewis and I had written two weeks earlier, but which sounded like it could have been from 1850.’
The pair called it La Cura D’Amore, which translates, more or less, as The Worry Of Love, a reminder that opera, rather than women, will become the abiding love of Morse’s life.
It’s curious that the show’s star, for whom Endeavour has been a breakout role, seems to reference the Thaw years less than anyone else. Says Timmer: ‘What inspired Shaun was Colin Dexter’s books and taking a magnifying glass to Russell Lewis’s scripts. He did not watch John Thaw’s Morse. For him, he is making a series that stands alone.’
Undoubtedly it does. In an era of slick box sets and streaming, Endeavour has become appointment TV. It’s made without special effects or gimmicks – the nearest the Endeavour team got to that was in Prey, an episode in series three when the killer turned out to be a tiger.
Timmer is promising fans of the Morse universe a significant reveal in series seven: ‘They’ll be very intrigued by one of the characters we are about to meet,’ he says.
He won’t elaborate on who, when or why – like everything else in the show, it’s a mystery that will only be solved clue by careful clue.
‘Endeavour’ returns to ITV tonight at 8pm
Did you spot these hidden clues?
1. The severed arm in the river
In the Prey episode in series three, a young woman undresses to go for a night-time dip in the river but her love interest is too drunk to join her. Later, when her severed arm is found, pathologist Max DeBryn is recalled from a fishing trip to examine the limb, replicating a scene in Jaws starring Richard Dreyfuss as oceanographer Matt Hooper. DeBryn notes there are ‘portions of denuded bone’ remaining, a lift straight from the film’s screenplay.
Colin Dexter approved of Evans’s portrayal of the youthful Endeavour only because there would be no overlap with John Thaw’s original
2. ‘It’s in the trees – it’s coming’
This line from 1957 British horror Night Of The Demon was sampled by singer Kate Bush on her 1985 album Hounds Of Love. During the Prey episode, the words are yelled by someone in a search party combing the woods for the missing woman.
3. The girl on the poster
In Neverland, Endeavour keeps passing a poster of a pretty girl, which is increasingly covered in violent graffiti – just like the woman who advertises the Welsh coast in the Philip Larkin poem Sunny Prestatyn. By the end, the poster has been replaced with one that says ‘Fight Cancer’, from the poem’s final line.
4. Here’s to you, Mrs Robinson
The death of director Mike Nichols part way through series three was noted with a scene in which a glamorous older woman, Mrs Richardson, the wife of a supermarket owner, gets flirty with Endeavour. It was a homage to the older seductress Mrs Robinson in one of Nichols’s best-loved films, The Graduate.