![]() Lewis’s scripts for Endeavour respect the policy of Dexter – a crossword obsessive – that crime fiction is a puzzle. So the character was around 23 in 1965, when the first series of Endeavour was set.” Morse has had various birthdays – 1930 in Colin Dexter’s novels, 1938 in the first TV series – but Lewis gave the date another poignant nudge: “I went for John Thaw’s birth year of 1942. Lewis, who wrote one script for Inspector Morse and four for its sequel series Lewis, was asked at the start of the last decade if there might be a third continuation – this time backwards. Others may be drawn by a pleasantly educational experience: as in The Crown, the story spools through British history between episodes and seasons.īy 2021, England has reached its 1970s – “I never imagined we’d get out of the 60s,” admits writer Russell Lewis – and Morse celebrates, as much as a gloomy man can, three decades. The core of the seven million audience – very high in a maxi-channel digital landscape – are grateful for a continuation of the Morse series, the model for all plotty, classy British police procedurals such as Poirot, A Touch of Frost, Inspector George Gently and Vera. By the end of this month, ITV will have filled almost 200 hours of first-run peak-time across nearly a quarter of a century with Inspector Morse (1987-2000), its sequel Lewis (2006-15) and, since 2011, Endeavour. ![]() The success of the show, though, continued the already astonishing popularity of the Morse franchise. Allam’s fear was that a returning series would become tedious: 10 appearances as cynical minister Peter Mannion in The Thick of It was as long as he’d lasted in any part.Įvans is also taken aback by the show’s endurance: “I was originally offered it as a single project, exploring Morse’s origins. He stresses that he liked the scripts and his role as DI Fred Thursday, the mentor to the Oxford copper portrayed – earlier in TV history, later in narrative chronology – by John Thaw in Inspector Morse, and now by Shaun Evans. I refused, and in the end committed to two years.” Since then, he has taken it “a year at a time”. When he was offered a three-season contract, he recalls: “I felt a huge sinking feeling in my stomach. The return this weekend of Endeavour – ITV’s prequel to Inspector Morse – for its eighth series will thrill its seven million viewers, but co-star Roger Allam is surprised still to be around.
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