TS: Lewis vs Morse

Lewis obv

My mom loves Lewis, like to an unsettling degree.

Morse, but i've never watched Lewis

IT'S ABOUT PERVASIVE VIOLENT DEATH in an UPPER MIDDLE CLASS WORLD

(ok so is morse)

I am watching the "Twilight tribute" ep. You are missing out, Noodle V, it is like Morse but better.

Yes, but do you think he's cute? I have to hear about how cute he is, and since I don't even watch it I am not sure why my mom has to tell me about his cuteness.

He is not cute.

Are any TV detectives cute? New thread enquiry perhaps.

Um....I'm drawing a blank. I'm sure there's probably been one or two in the history of television, but I can't think of any.

Ivan Kaye in 'Sam Saturday'?

NOT CUTE

racking my brain here. wd argue that John Thaw was at least handsome on his good days. not cute tho.

http://www.dvdtalk.com/reviews/images/reviews/68/1247821701_1.jpg

^^^the bar to clear

ps not cute

http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-wJvuPgXlYpQ/Td_3jKLljOI/AAAAAAAAAJU/wUJHik-ALxU/s1600/jimrocky.jpg

thought Jim Rockford was so cool when i was a boy

anyway, Lewis is a stodgy utilitarian, am i right in assuming that his batman in Lewis is the tempermental intellectual?

also are we supposed to realise that Morse isn't as clever as he thinks he is? or is that an accident of the writing?

his batman is indeed the temperamental intellectual (also a tormented gay ex-christian!)

lewis = also tormented, as his wife was killed in a traffic accident before the series began

http://www.thrillingdetective.com/images/shoestring.jpg

^^^???

jim rockford is cool but not cute

the oxford multiple-murder rate is frightening as ever, so lewis is evidently exactly as clever as morse

right now he is unhappily interrogating the woman he fancies, so no change there either

lol no change whatsoever then

http://www.tvacres.com/images/word_banacek.jpg

^^^more from the golden age of one-name tec TV series = BANECEK

i think Morse's clinging to culture as a mark of status and his evident ambivalence about being held just at arm's length from academia are part of that lack of real wisdom - as well as continually falling for number 1 suspects, obv. so much of his demeanour smacks of a desperation to prove to the University elite that he was up to snuff all along.

before we get to his "solve murder by waiting until all other viable suspects have been offed" technique

tried and tested: his disciple deploys the same infallible method

also: no matter what byzantine theories you develop re: politics, professional rivalries, corruption, all murders are motivated by sex or money

their boss is played by rebecca front, who is a massive -- patient, amused and smart -- improvement on troutface or whatever he was called

i'm not seeing Trevor Eve as cute myself.

what about young David Yip tho?

http://www.motorbar.co.uk/images/dvd_chinesedetective.jpg

my theory is that there are no cute detectives, so we have to test the limit cases

xp good call! terrible actor tho

http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_vKkO-Vg3VbQ/TPeGe1rWc2I/AAAAAAAABL0/E6Z9-jA0z58/s1600/dempsey-makepeace.jpg

all i remember of The Chinese Detective is that one ep where somebody got crucified in a gangland revenge scenario, can't remember whether he cd act or not in that but he did Brookie later and he was down to the required standard

xps - I was a devoted Shoestring watcher - i wonder if it was rubbish?

Going Morse for this, much as I enjoy them both. Thaw was great anyway but (as someone who had read the books before the tv)I thought he was terrific as Morse.

xp yes its's brookside i'm mainly judging yip by

http://www.bbc.co.uk/drama/content/images/2007/04/30/home_619x251.jpg

by the late 80s nobody in Brookie cd act tbf

I‘d say that Zen is cute if perhaps a little too rugged.
http://i.telegraph.co.uk/multimedia/archive/01791/sewell-zen_1791797e.jpg

http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-6jnIK8BUbm4/TdaPL5rDIcI/AAAAAAAABm0/g30jYeHFjdc/s1600/police%2Bstory.jpg

yeah but that's cheating, there must be a ton of cute movie detectives

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PaOELExvOk8

took me a while to realise that this is totally a spoof of Morse, not grumpy middle-aged 'tecs in general

oops sorry, it was TV wasn't it

morse 1: lewis 0 after tonight's ABSURDLY GOTH* conclusion :(

*it was a halloween special originally i think (i hope)

mark s in contrarian so-and-so shockah!!

haven't quite managed to get into this but I'm confident that this is a no go. Lewis did happen to be the best sidekick because he was as good as Morse tho'. The proof was when Morse failed to marry that doctor who fancied him.

Incidentally women find Columbo's shabby look cute...and I'm inclined to believe the probably male scriptwriters them.

Hathaway is ABSURDLY attractive, although admittedly kind of "ugly" (why the long face?) but not in a way that matters. Also questioning your "gay" statement because of that a couple of eps that touch on his past affairs w women.

i think hathaway's past is entirely rebooted for each episode

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1aWTP7W5AW8

hathaway not gay in tonight's ep

Perhaps Hathaway has an open mind when it comes to his sexuality. (Second the absurdly attractive thing. Do sidekicks count in the cute ratings?)

sorry guys, but Lewis is embarrassingly shit. Lewis seems to represent the tragedy of the contemporary male condition, whilst Morse seemed to embody the vibrancy of it. Lewis is sad and pathetic, Morse definitely wasn't.

u seem to have mistaken Morse for a competent detective getting non-stop lady action

there were many suggestions that Morse was getting quite a bit of action, a love interest every episode at one point. But anyway, that wasn't quite the nuance of my thought.

a love interest every episode at one point

some of them not murderers.

but to call a morose, functional alcoholic who uses his education to belittle his peers and is almost painfully inept in matters of the heart "vibrant" and his family-loving, sympathetic partner "pathetic" is...something

ok ok i get it, you like the drip.

not the point at all, really. yr contempt for Lewis's humanity is interesting. of course Morse is a compelling character, and likeable too, but this is because of his car-wreckness, not despite it. Lewis is sort of deliberately underdrawn in Morse in order to throw Morse's romantic hero into sharper relief but Endeavour is pretty much a Polidori who wishes he was Byron. also in the first ever ep he wears a hilarious leather jacket in one scene. so try-hard.

So you don't think Morse is a very authentic character? I think that is a question which is quite central to the integrity of the show. If you have trouble suspending your disbelief then surely it's quite a serious problem that pervades the entire production - a problem with the way it was written, acted, directed etc.

as mark pointed out upthread, Morse is a fairy-tale set in a magical Oxford where all the council estates have disappeared and the murder rate is somewhat higher than south central LA. authenticity doesn't come into it really, but Morse is perfectly believable as a human being. like a lot of human beings he is a very bad understander of his own soul, and his dissatisfaction has curdled into a general, defensive misanthropy. except around handsome middle-aged women.

they're not all middle-aged by any means! they just have to be wearing a skirt

lol truth

tho i've got to say his taste leans towards the more experienced English character actress

re: magical Oxford - that's certainly true, ha.

Even if Morse is easily captured in the romantic aesthetic, there's something to be said for his character. Lewis, as I mentioned before, is a sad and conservative indictment of contemporary life bereft of any vitality, very depressing and not something I wish to engage with regularly.

if I'd known this many people watched Lewis I'd have turned round and gone the other way a few weeks ago when I was slobbily dressed and found my walk home covered in giant filming lights everywhere, too dazzling to work out what was actually being filmed (if anything)

saw two episodes from the first series which seemed to have some slightly unconvincing attempts at edginess shoehorned in (iirc the sidekick turned out to have ~history~ with the victim and/or main suspects of both, one of them from his time in a mysterious cult or something), but I suspect Morse must've been like that too and I was too young to notice

Morse had that ravers ep!

that's a classic one. lol.

well i think with morse the "mysterious edgy cult" was actually "behind the scenes at an oxford college" <-- ie this was groundbreaking behind-the-green-door stuff, in whodunnit-with-the-curare-tipped-blowpipe terms: but yes, the three i just saw back-to-back plus the one a passing spacecadet mentions (which i saw about a month ago) do all work the "weirdos are among us" lever a bit heavily (and hathaway seems to have to recuse himself a lot, but as noted my theory is that his backstory resets to zero every time)

right back to sherlock h, tec-fiction switches between the episodes which are subtly mundane -- "the norwood builder" -- and the eps which are pruriently exotic, pegleg lascars, secret societies, the mormons etc

xxp I do remember that one! I considered mentioning it. I don't remember any other episodes like that, but maybe it's only because rave culture was a thing I was dimly aware of, as an admittedly v sheltered 12y/o who liked the Shamen, and any other "edgy" references were completely lost on me

(checked the air date in case I'd severely miscalculated my age when seeing it, and Wikipedia says it was directed by Danny Boyle! Apologies if this was common knowledge...)

now I have read it and not just stomped past it to the Submit button, mark s's post seems wise

hoping future Lewis viewings will be improved if I take "Hathaway's backstory resets every week so he can have history with whatever any victim/suspect does" as the intentional recurring schtick of the show, rather than an accidentally overused plot point

i knew but i'd forgotten. lot of biggish writers and directors did a Morse ep

the rave one is quite bad in many ways btw

Lewis ≥ Morse >>>>>>>>>>>>> Endeavour

Are any TV detectives cute? New thread enquiry perhaps.

― mark s, Thursday, 17 November 2011 21:36 (six years ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

mark mark mark... John Nettles? Catnip to ladies of a certain vintage.

https://i.pinimg.com/originals/7a/50/7f/7a507fecb29df297303b5706d9fa748a.jpg

http://i.dailymail.co.uk/i/pix/2016/08/31/01/37B6B5D700000578-0-image-m-69_1472605046580.jpg

Berge

I like Endeavour, but it is a bit DO YOU SEE???

Is there a Midsomer Murders thread?

Taking Sides: Midsomer Murders vs 24

Only this one, apparently.

john nettles' nipples: too close together? a visual investigation

Lewis > DCI Banks > Scott & Bailey > Morse > Silent Witness > Broadchurch >>>>>>>>> Endeavor

I liked Judge John Deed tbf but not sure it qualifies?

I can bear anything with Martin Shaw in it, so disqualified.

Fair.

Morse hasn't aged well tbh

Scott & Bailey doesn't really fit tho it's an ok show, i want to see toffs murdering each other

haven't watched Banks, nor hardly any of Broadchurch. French and Saunders have permanently rewired the other one as Witless Silence in my head

Well yeah, because he's dead... But y'know what I mean xp

Morse has definitely aged but mostly in quite a cute way imo

https://www.itv.com/presscentre/sites/default/files/styles/pi_large/public/DCI_BANKS4_EP1.jpg

Don't know their names but these three (Banks) are all just really good actors. At least in this series.

Morse feels too nostalgic for me to take completely seriously these days? Idk maybe that is indeed cute. Simpler times etc

not sure of the one on the left, Stephen Tompkinson in the middle, Doc Marten's wife on the right

i.e. same revolving cast of actors that are in everything.

i don't watch this stuff to be challenged

Same. It's comfort food.

Can't stand that one with Brenda Blethyn in it, dressed all dowdy, though it has got Jon Morrison in it.

Vera isn't terrible but too seedy again, like most of Frost for that matter

and i kinda like Dalziel and Pascoe against my better instincts, it's basically a celebration of twattery

Vera gives lots of actors the chance to "Tak like that, man. I divven't kna what's happened to wor lass, like". And Alun Armstrong isn't even in it.

New Tricks! liked that before all the good actors left/died

I can't take Brenda Blethyn's crap Geordie accent

My mum loves it though, and every other show mentioned above. I was wondering whether to recommend Game of Thrones to her (too violent?) until we watched a Silent Witness where a lead character got his skull crushed and his body set on fire

I like the Dalziel and Pascoe books, never saw the show.

I've read most of if not all of the Banks books. Still laughing that one book was about a Mojo writer getting murdered while writing an article about Not At All Syd Barrett.

its been on in the background as i do the dishes and i feel very very strongly that nobody involved in endeavour should be paid to be so

Roger Allan's solid enough. I've watched very few of them tho, it's not a patch on its 2 companion serieses

I typed Allam, my phone is a dick

i love roger allam but the scene i caught was parody dressed as historical drama

It's no Heartbeat

endeavour sends me into instant anachronism hives every fucking episode: someone always uses a spoken phrase no one used before 1995

of all the "classic prog rock band gets back together then one of them is murdered" stories in all the brit-tec series, the lewis one is way worst

A Blairite with long term memory loss is found as a stunning new exhibit at the Museum of Human Disease. Suspicion falls on Little Crosby’s professional clown guild, angry that sex-toy anarchists might threaten to upset their plans for world domination.

— Midsomer Murders Bot (@midsomerplots) December 3, 2018

also a handy bit of pub quiz knowledge: the number of villages in midsomer murders called midsomer ____________

answer here, but guess before you look:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Midsomer_Murders#List_of_fictional_villages_in_Midsomer

Endeavour gets better iirc. It’s preferable to Lewis.

i am happily not in the position of being forced to choose

there are v many things that get better that are still better off left id say

the endeavour on right now features a suicide or possibly murder in a TV studio absurdly closely based on thunderbirds complete with gerry and sylvia anderson lookeylikeys

TOO MUCH SWINGING NOT ENOUGH PUPPETRY

just seen this mentioned on Facebook and am looking forward to a repeat as soon as possible

the story was bad but the look of some of the sets was good, 1969-style, also N. Dev. now has a tache

I've seen his moustache, there's a big advertising billboard for this season near where I work.

this is why i no longer leave the house tbh

To be clear, I am in no way having the best day of my life ever drinking all of these leftist tears.

My cup it overfloweth.

But please don’t stop.

— LAURENCE FOX (@LozzaFox) January 17, 2020

Lewis obv

― mark s, Thursday, 17 November 2011 bookmarkflaglink

🤔

the problem with all this culture wars bullshit is, no-marks like this who I wouldn't even normally heard of polluting my space. And lots of melts whose politics are utter garbage are suddenly the big heroes and good ..not!

Laurence Fox, the anti woke bad boy 💯 pic.twitter.com/1Z4QvevD35

— Josh Berry (@JBImpressions) January 17, 2020

you want culture wars, here you go: nothing in this thread* said by me is incorrect

*or any other ever

You’re always an invaluable contributor on the subject of Rory Stewart!

key gloss on the NDev ep mentioned above:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ObruuuRw-jw

note that the aquaphibian prison is called AQUATRAZ

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/EOeIVjLX4AAk784?format=jpg&name=900x900

I'd honestly never heard of this cunt before, for a second I thought that QT clip was Garry Monk. Lol what a 3 time loser, shit actor and in a shit landfill band - no wonder he's so bitter!

i like billie piper but she has bad taste in men

also son eugene's full name is eugene pip fox-piper get a grip here ppl

Pre-culture war: Morse

Post-culture war: Lewis

ts louis vs morbse

would like a cartoon version of Morse where Morse and Lewis were grizzled cats

i don't remember knowing about the Piper-Fox ship. i still love Hathaway tbh but i've been on the rum

Both Fox’s albums, one would hazard a guess, are informed by his failed marriage to Billie Piper (the first was released just before the marriage ended), but the defining song for Laurence Fox as he is now fixed in the public eye – crusader for common sense, or halfwitted bigot, depending on your point of view – is The Distance, whose lyrics are pinned at the top of his Facebook page. Here Fox explains how you’re just not allowed to say anything any more: “The first to fall is laughter / Just to quell the unoffended / They seek to murder your opinion,” sings the man who gets repeated national newspaper interviews and TV appearances in which to express his opinion. “The light has been turned down on the age of reason / Replaced by blinding fires that burn wild across the region,” he sings, before offering a couplet that unwittingly summons the memory of Nigel Farage pledging to take up his rifle if Brexit were denied: “So I need you more than ever / Need your hands in this resistance.”

I forget if the ep of Lewis where one of the members of an ageing 60s rock group is electrocuted on-stage -- it turns out by one of the others, over Fleetwood Mac-style be-swapping shenanigans 40 years ago lol -- is also the ep where Hathaway's fancy guitar is stolen and the duo have to get it back by unorthodox means. Anyway Fox gets to play guitar every now and then on-screen: he is no John Fahey. The best bit abt the rock group ep is that Lewis ends up flailing around in the treatment pool of a sewage farm iirc.

i thought it was Hathaway, appositely, who ends up in the slurry but i could be wrong

also he plays in an "ambient world fusion" band or something like that

I've read about five tweets from diff people I follow calling for the Laurence Fox tweets to stop. I think only other subjects that I've seen this much pain on the timeline over are Tony Blair and the Lab party.

nah, the stolen guitar episode is the quiz weekend one with Alan Davies guest starring

in which Davies plays an obnoxious shifty self-regarding twat

the ep of Lewis where one of the members of an ageing 60s rock group is electrocuted on-stage

This sounds very much like Midsomer Murders' 'The Axeman Cometh':

55 4 "The Axeman Cometh" Renny Rye Michael Aitkens 2 February 2007 August/September 2006 6.87
The music lovers of Midsomer County are delighted when a host of bands arrives for the Midsomer Rocks festival. Barnaby himself is particularly looking forward to seeing recently re-formed rock band, Hired Gun, perform on stage, but he soon gets close to the band for rather unfortunate reasons. During their opening performance, the band's singer, Mimi (Suzi Quatro), falls to the ground dead – electrocuted by a wire that had been run through the microphone stand. Barnaby and Jones soon find the rest of the band could be targets, and when another is killed, questions are raised as to whether former band member, Ginger Foxton, who went missing for 30 years and is presumed dead, is still at large. The detectives soon have to delve into a world of rock music, drug use and greed, to find the truth.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w0pekalbPjk

Suzi Quatro was on Midsomer Murders?

I guess Hathaway being a supercilious prick wasn't really acting... still like watching Lewis, it's supremely relaxing

lol yes there's also an ageing rock-blues ep in waking the dead, feat.nigel terry as a virtuoso guitarist who's also a hitman for a sinister club owner (i think he also has alzheimer's, it's a complicated episode)

Jonathan Creek has one too!

even Death in Paradise has one, except with a reggae band (Jonathan Creek's is, of course, a prog band)

just tried watching an ep of this on Youtube (Counter Culture Blues) and couldn't make it past 5 minutes!

these shows are so satisfying, our relatable quotidian becomes exceptional in the context of a murder investigation

brb writing a MARPLE script that finally ties these unsolved crimes together: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_entertainers_who_died_during_a_performance

Suzi Quatro was on Midsomer Murders?

― the girl from spirea x (f. hazel), Tuesday, January 21, 2020 4:00 PM (sixteen minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

You bet! And yr otm about how satisyfing these shows are, though Death in Paradise is an outlier I can't watch for some reason. I will cop to having seen more Father Brown episodes than I'd like to admit though :-/

it probably doesn't help that I know how appalling his sidekick is before I've been drawn into it.

^^ similarly, learning Ali Carter is a Farage retweeter and stan ruined watching him play the Masters last week.

I've vowed to not look up the p0litics of English actors any longer.

Pro tip: they're all Tories

morse is best because my grandpa looked just like john thaw

that's it, lock thread

xp I know Neil Dudgeon id's openly as Labour (but don't ask me what brand/melt/spice/etc)

my favorite character in Morse and Lewis is Oxford

also tory iirc

but Mary Beard

the ep of Lewis where one of the members of an ageing 60s rock group is electrocuted on-stage

Is this the one with Joanna Lumley as a mysterious rock chick?

a mysterious rock chick's twin

Spoiler alert, mark.

yeah some of us have only seen that episode 5-7 times

LOL:

Alexander Woollcott suffered a heart attack during a radio show in which he and four other individuals were having a discussion about Hitler. Listeners were oblivious to the fact that anything was out of the ordinary. Several of them reported that Woollcott, known for being strongly opinionated, was unusually quiet.

^^^this story is rather less bathetically recounted in thurber's "the years with ross"

Waking the Dead and Midsomer Murder both had elder Foxes guest star. I can ever remember which one is Laurence’s dad.

I am laughing a bit about his complaints about 1917 because he was in a WW1 movie about a haunted trench. Are ghosts historically accurate???

my complaints about 1917 is that it is another bad sentimental bullshit war movie by a dreadful director. But yeah, what a prize pumper for saying that!

it's not like a member of the Fox family to go nuts

This made me laugh

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2r0XnLs7DSc

The Greek ep of Morse is so good, he hits some special notes of obnoxiousness, also I want to read The Magus for the first time in 30+ years

tfw you settle down for a nice long maigret and it's just mr bean w/a sour puss >:(

The Greek ep is one of my faves

I quite like Atkinson as Maigret tbh

i'm still watching

(tho given the topic of this thread that is no index of quality)

I'm a discerning viewer I'll have you know

lol im not

"Is there a butler?"
"Haven't seen one sir."
"Pity. It might have saved us a lot of time."

i just watched an entire ep of father brown -- lol it was extremely terrible

(not a gkc story for a start but even so)

The Father Browns are really wrong as far as the stories are concerned, they might as well have just called it something else.

Maths geek listening to Muse ergo clearly deserves to die

Lol Peggy Mount in two minute nun cameo

God Morse is a sex pest

Still getting handsy with the only surviving criminal

You should try the Elmore Leonard novel where the hero hits on his girlfriend outside the rape clinic

The unemployment rate amongst posh elfin actresses must have shot up when they stopped making Lewis

lol true

I don't know, I have Britbox and there are roughly 5,000 murder mysteries on there packed with posh elfins and hapless dad bods

i love Endeavour (esp w mustache) & enjoy Lewis (though Hathaway holds most of the appeal there)... is it weird i’ve never watched Morse? mum used to watch, feel like i absorbed it vicariously

i am v fucked off that britbox & acorn stole all
most of the brit detective shows off Prime

went to do a rewatch of Cracker but it was the bloody American remake! /vomit emoji

i am v fucked off that britbox & acorn stole most of the brit detective shows off Prime

take it to the JiC thread

shush

truly this thread was my "horror cannot be set in space" lol

also i see that wikipedia have deleted the list of the name of midsomer villages, which is like the burning of the library of alexandria x one trillion

Ffs the librarians that burn their own holdings

i love Endeavour (esp w mustache) & enjoy Lewis (though Hathaway holds most of the appeal there)..

Probably best not to read about the subsequent exploits of the actor who played Hathaway then. Could never stand him myself.

Hathaway and shite

hitchcock: "actors are cattle"
you, aghast: "hitchcock is cancelled!"
actors: "hold my beer"

Probably best not to read about the subsequent exploits of the actor who played Hathaway then. Could never stand him myself.

How about talentless posh cunt from a long line of privileged right wing wankers?

Yeah that's one of the more disappointing of disappointments in People Who Turn Out to Be Shitheads.

we called Fox the Gwyneth Paltrow of British TV because women liked him but men instantly hated him and were later vindicated by his despicable behavior

anyway xpost, but I can't really rewatch Morse these days either. It's A. ponderously slow and B. the morality on display hasn't aged well. I'm more excited about a new season of Shakespeare and Hathaway, speaking of Hathaways. The mysteries are barely half a step above Death in Paradise but the leads are so delightful I don't care.

Hathaway's mayoral candidate video came up as one of my pre-rolls on YouTube and I felt like I must have done something shameful to deserve it.

we called Fox the Gwyneth Paltrow of British TV because women liked him but men instantly hated him

tbft that line of posh privileged wankers it did at one time include some actors who (despite being cattle) were good not bad

AS ACTORS

"Kill the actors"

http://www.imfdb.org/images/thumb/8/8c/Prod68_03.jpg/600px-Prod68_03.jpg

i still enjoy Hathaway tbh not sure Lozza's shenanigans don't add layers

adding in "(the ACAB years)" to every series of all procedurals ever, and never being wrong

also i stand by the hathaway backstory-reset as a tool to interpret this show

the only constants in Hathaway's backstory are god-bothering and jazz fusion and i'm sure there's an exception to them somewhere

shocking how less than 10 years ago i'd never watched Lewis and now i can quote whole eps

Poor old Lewis stuck with that miserable old git Morse then the possibly even more miserable Hathaway.

Lewis excels above Endeavor and Morse at the crucial police/detective procedural scene: having coffee at a picturesque local cafe and talking about murder, then suddenly having to leave

also lewis has a competent boss: morse just the "maverick" to tropey mctroutface or whatever he's called

even Innocent goes a bit Oxford Mafia every now and then tho

It’s been awhile since I watched Morse, but I seem to remember in the first few episodes he wasn’t actually that good at solving the crimes.

Yes, Morse got it wrong in quite a few episodes throughout the series: "The Silent World of Nicholas Quinn", "Driven to Distraction" (where he victimised an innocent car dealer), the one set in Australia ("Promised Land") and particularly "Dead on Time", when he meets his former fiancée again and remains clueless right to the end. Not sure whether this is also a feature of Colin Dexter's books.

Quick ten minutes of "Morse Goes Raving" is as terrible as I remember but also weirdly brilliantly peak Morse

Not you Boyle you're shit sit down

somehow it's also all about angels iirc

Getaway car hitting a tree at 5 mph and exploding in a ball of flame just made me hurt myself laughing

Fuck me now it's the dork who replaced Nick Berry in Heartbeat with huge bouffant ebergy

e-bergy! e-bergy! it's ebbernee-bergy!

particularly "Dead on Time", when he meets his former fiancée again and remains clueless right to the end. Not sure whether this is also a feature of Colin Dexter's books.

― Portsmouth Bubblejet, Wednesday, 7 April 2021 bookmarkflaglink

Absolutely love how Lewis solved the case and doesn't let Morse know just because of his affection for him.

talentless posh cunt from a long line of privileged right wing wankers made it to our front pages, ugh:

https://www.volkskrant.nl/nieuws-achtergrond/britse-acteur-die-londen-veel-te-woke-vindt-wil-daar-burgemeester-worden~be792e98/

Hugh Grant has been flirting with the Liberal Democrats for years, mainly out of personal dissatisfaction with Brexit and the power of the conservative press.

this posh cunt needs sending to the gulag as well!

They're showing the very first Morse ep, and Holy Fuck John Thaw was only 44 when it was filmed. I mean, he was one of those guys who always looked old, but damn.

turned my TV on and there's morse being horny lol

wait did this posh woman just call someone a "stupid little cvnt"?

now watching morse from the very very start

it's kind of a compressed speed-run of everything that follows (morse is horny, the musical lady in question does not survive; strange is exasperated, tho to be fair in a more kindly way than will be the case in the future; lewis is barely out of his teens and full of not-yet-squashed vim)

i think "Morse in leather jacket" is the second ep not the first but it sure is a treat

lewis just gave morse this reason he must be wrong abt a deduction: "that's because you're in a bad mood!" (said very perkily)

wait i'm not watching endeavour i'm watching morse ("from the start" is admittedly somewhat misleading)

it's lewis's birthday is why he's so "sparky this morning" (©morse crossly)

no seriously second ep of Morse proper features him rocking a deeply unfortunate leather jacket. a wardrobe choice that was quickly discarded

well i'm not doing anything else this evening :)

Shaun Evans in the final season of endeavour is approximately the same age as thaw was in season 1 of Morse. The baton, cleanly handed off!

good that means i never have to watch any of endeavour

i've barely watched Endeavour considering i know the other two shows off by heart more or less. it looks alright when i've seen it but too much backfill or something

that Shaun Evans is a very watchable actor tho

meanwhile morse s1e1 ends "it had to be you because there wasn't anyone else really" so that's now solidly in place too 😇

said with a measure of self-disgust tbf

would like to see the stats on how many people died because of his "wait until all the other suspects are dead" method

Endeavour is great, in large part due to Roger Allan and Anton Lesser who are great foils to Shaun Evans.

it sets off my stupid linguistic anachronism alarm more than any other TV show i've ever attempted

s1 e2: no leather jacket so far but the niggling between M and L and pleasingly frisky; also roger lloyd-pack klaxon

*is* pleasingly frisky

i've just googled and maybe the jacket is in the very first one, Dead of Jericho?

or i have some kind of bizarre long-term fetish hallucination

k i found a reference

Thankfully, Morse’s leather jacket and hat combination never resurfaced in future episodes.

https://morseandlewisandendeavour.com/2014/01/30/the-dead-of-jericho/

lol i went back and yes, it's the scene where lewis (still working for a different boss) catches a mysterious someone snooping round the dead lady's house in the dark, except it's morse!! tho i think it's more for the purposes of viewer-misdirection than off-piste character-construction… we're not meant to guess who it is until the reveal (scene also includes first appearance of the sophocles misdirect)

then they go a crappy pub together and bicker

i've always liked to think of it as Morse clinging to his hipster ladies man dreams

well his squeeze-interest is by then no more, maybe he was hoping to pull later on that evening (in the crappy pub)

except he encountered lewis instead, sadly cramping his style

hackstory for e2: every single oxford college is wildly and murderously corrupt, everyone employed by them is noxiously snobby (and also fvcking)

backstory also hackstory

twice in two eps that morse gets biffed on the noggin by a sharp object bcz he thinks he's cleverer than he actually is, and serve him right

e3: murder in a church (poison-stabbing during communion to be precise)

michael hordern cameo: he does his usual and it's fine :)

i feel like "morse! people just call me morse" does his sex life no good at all

im totally turned around on endeavour now because it kept being on in the background whether i liked it or not and ive grown to pretty much love every performance in it, and i got fondernof the stylistic directorial/production nods

😔

meanwhile this is a very silly ep of morse (s1 e3)

s2 e1: has a bunch of ageing american tourists and simon callow and it's annoying

ok just saw callow's stunt bubble-butt so things are looking up (they're not)

s2 e 2/3: two fairly poor eps, both over-freighted w/frantic explanation at the end

the first is set at a posh girls' school and features liz hurley's first ever TV appearance (blonde so it took me a bit to recognise here despite w/her trademark dark eyebrows; she's fine as the missing girl's friend i guess); second very implausibly involves a japanese drugs dealer and morse complaining (correctly) abt drugs as a v crappy plot point

at the girls' school morse manages to be less goatish than usual tho he does make one untoward comment abt the aesthetics of the sports skirt (lewis raising a disgusted eyebrow); in the second an old morse gf acts well enough when indicating how fed up of him she is (relatable since he is as always insufferable) and then increasingly badly as the bodies pile up. it has a vague feel of gaudy night.

in both there's a posh boss-level type who is unwatchably dickish (headmaster; master of college)

s2 e4: this was in fact p good: just a bunch of sordid, shabby, small-beer behaviour ending in catastrophe: nothing too elaborate, plus a commentary on or thru jacobean love poetry, the latter not laid on with a trowel for once

morse behaves himself and abstains from music 👍🏽

s3 e1: lordly family up to no good, morse solves the crime by applied cultural snobbery (spelling and opera)

stars patsy byrne reupping her role as nursie from blackadder, but serious this time -- which tbh distracts a bit from the general gravitas

now wondering if ppl in real life scream when they find bodies, esp.when it's basically someone just lying there

turns out this was was missing a head, so fair enough

is that the one with the gardener using his old school tie as a belt and a snotty kid telling a policewoman " how dare you call me Georgie!"

yes and yes!

the child has been quietly seen but not heard until that moment and only now grasps that her parents have both been taken away, by the grim reaper or the even grimmer detective chief inspector, so her feelings are justified, if not perhaps the pretext of her tantrum

morse is more disgusted than amused by the tie (harrow) as a belt and clearly files the gardener as a wrong'un there and then: later he discovers that the same gardener spells "civilised" with an "s" not a "z", which he says is "illiterate" (it isn't, it's fine) and adds this to his crimes

"Oxford" spelling retains the z in words with the "ize" form whereas the standard UK English spelling tends to go with "ise"

my understanding is "ize" is actually more etymologically correct, but my further understanding is this matters to only the kind of pedants you'd expect to try and score points off it

therefore that's a joke on Morse imo

i feel like the early eps especially are pretty good on drawing out his massive insecurities about class and Oxford, intentionally or not. god if i think about it too hard he's such a tragic figure it's hard to watch

xp morze

now wondering if ppl in real life scream when they find bodies, esp.when it's basically someone just lying there

The one that gets me is I wonder if IRL people are as snotty, begrudging and uncooperative when the police show up at their door to investigate a murder of someone they know or are, occasionally, related to. "Oh, you'd better come on then".

The snotty suspects tend to be obvious red herrings. I suppose

(xp) That should be "Oh, you'd better come in then, I suppose"

yeah that always grinds me gears, especially when the cops don't pointedly explain that they're trying to find out who killed this alleged love one

NV correct re the logic of "ize": it derives from the greek root (latin doesn't really have a z) and so sticklers continue to favour it

but it's a pig to handle if yr a hard-pressed copy editor as there are a bunch of words that nevertheless have always to be "ise": including advertise and improvise

as a consequence mistakes are less likely to creep into tired proofing (or find-cut-and-paste proofing lol) if you just make everything "ise"

(the ep is called {"the ghost in the machine" and there's a subtext abt the rise computers -- which morse of course hates and lewis likes -- and the triumph of the robots and also of crappy soft porn over true artistic eroticism, but i can't pretend it's especially convincingly developed)

The snotty suspects tend to be obvious red herrings. I suppose

In Morse they tend to be very quickly end up dead too.

max the pathologist -- who is fun bcz he always gives morse a hard time -- seems to be being retired in favour of dr russell, who will i believe become one of morse's ladies of interest

at the moment she is trying to teach him not to be such a patronising old sexist all the time

i love Grayling Russell, she isn't in enough episodes tbh and even tho she starts off not tolerating Morse's nonsense she sadly, unbelievably ends up kind of tolerating his nonsense

i am busy using my computer to change "ize" to "ise" all afternoon for money -- but i may write up some quick thoughts on morse's adventures in music and dating later

i love Grayling Russell, she isn't in enough episodes tbh and even tho she starts off not tolerating Morse's nonsense she sadly, unbelievably ends up kind of tolerating his nonsense

― Let's talk about local tomatoes (Noodle Vague), Thursday, 3 August 2023 bookmarkflaglink

Had a crush on her. Was a bit pissy at how she started tolerating Morse's nonsense.

Same

the ep i watched last night (s3 e2: "the last enemy") starts well enough -- it's abt ambition, petty jealousy, power and the dynamics of academia, political and sexual -- and rolls along, with various business-like cameos from well known faces (inc barry "van der valk" foster and michael "percy alleline" adlridge, the latter morse's tutor once upon a time (so we also get a glimpse of what academia thought of morse (had great potential, ruinously distracted -- by love of course). but it ends as they too often do with a big splurge of infodump backstory fulling in all the details

we've also now had two glimpses of how morse interweaves his love of music -- which is deep and very genuine, and which i find extremely irritating -- with his dating: an earlier ep when he tells grayling russell that he likes music, she says "oh! jazz?" and her replies (plaintively but also irritated) "music!"

then in this one he has a meal with a lady-of-interest (not dr russell) which takes place in a cheerily noisy and bustling jamaican eatery full of children and reggae and dreadlocked waiters. reggae is also not his thing viewers will be startled to discover

his issue of course is he uses taste as a social filter and an emotinal maginot line and then finds himself stranded miles distant from those he's drawn to: while all the choirs he's in are immediately shadowed by the corpses as they stack up lol

his love of music -- which is deep and very genuine, and which i find extremely irritating

New board description for ILM?

lol omar

The music thing is interesting. A lot of intellectual snobbery tics are cheap and reflexive - he's the scholarship boy desperate to prove his worth to social betters who will never give a shit and he can't/won't see this, and it's curdled him something rotten - but irrespective of what he affects not to like you're right mark, his love for what he does like is genuine and unaffected

he surrounds himself in it like an impenetrable armour

kinda wish ppl called me "pagan" tbh

Yeah it's quite a cool nickname if you're not poor self-conscious Endeavour

Is that the cricket team ep?

yes

I do like in morse how p much every villain is completely unremarkable and banal. one of the early ones about a missing schoolgirl has a terrifically whiny head teacher basically killing someone because it was "intolerable" that she would try to tell him what to do with HIS school.

think the only culprit I've been genuinely scared/creeped out by was the driving instructor one. and morse completely loses it during the entire episode persecuting the wrong guy.

When I was first watching them at the original broadcast date I used to argue that they nod to politics and conspiracy but the motives almost always end up being tawdry and personal. Don't know if I think that's good or bad now, but it's kind of good I guess. Law and Order often does a similar trick, the big motives are always supplanted by the small, sad motives

i'm only at no.10 right now but yes, so far i feel the Big Issues™️ have always been red herrings and it's actually at its best when everything is v small and crappy beer and ppl being dumb weasely shits

"his love of music -- which is deep and very genuine, and which i find extremely irritating"

Wonder how much it maps to someone like Scruton (not someone I am ever likely to read on music).

that definitely falls under "background research i will NOT be undertaking as an adjunct to this rewatch"*

my kneejerk impression is that morse uses it as kind of full sensualist wash which can be relied on to protect him from an ugly stupid world: where scruton actually wheels out the analytic and structural dimensions of classical composition as proof of (and key prizes in) the Western Civilisational Achievement etc

however this is second- or even third-hand apprehension of content so i may be quite wrong

*i just rewatched the cricket episode and was mildly amused to note that the two paperbacks abt zen buddhism which briefly feature as plot points are two books i myself own -- welcome to the first items you could grab off the shelves in a bookshop in the 80s

(adding: i found the cricket one p tiresome but it's probably the ep i've seen most often so the judgment isn't really fair maybe -- such comedy as it involves has become a little stale)

there's some especially toe-curling Morse lechery iirc

haha yes he makes a move of his dead friend's wife a wee bit quick, and then she and a quite different lady-of-interest seem strangely into him for some reason -- and then we find their reasons and lewis has to kindly help him escape some of the toe-curling going public

he doesn't disgrace himself but i think he does humiliate himself

s3 e4: The Secret of Bay 5B

in which grayling R sends signals (= pathologising in a scarlet evening dress! and for someone so um PERMANENTLY LORN, yr man almost entirely fails to recognise this lol

the tale itself is pleasingly low key and sad and grubby

the next one stars one of my favourite extremely dislikeable (hence very busy) actors = george costigan

Costigan is great, yeah, especially at playing sleazebags

funny given the tom wilkinson crossover that this ep has more or less the same plot as MICHAEL CLAYTON (2007)

different emphasis on different elements maybe :|

and then this next one's abt death by beer lol

plot is a dorothy sayers knock-off (apart from the beer)

(i generally find the rich-family-has-issues stories p hard going to be honest)

those story lines tend to play up the "Morse as embittered outsider" angle and they didn't need to keep doing it

tbf the stories with more lower middle/working class characters at the centre tend to highlight how bad the writers and actors often were at covering that territory, but i enjoy seeing their version of the machinery hidden behind the Byzantine world of dons and poshos

i've only read the first of the Morse books and it's probably enough for me - there's some grim stuff in Lewis's inner monologue especially - but it's interesting how much worse the book Morse is at passing as U and how much rougher around the edges he is

meanwhile:

FOR GOD'S SAKE MORSE RUN, SHE'LL EAT YOUR WHOLE HEAD LIKE A PRAYING MANTIS pic.twitter.com/adYjsBpYZg

— Je téléphone à la police (@je_police) May 27, 2023

i'd let her tbh

but it's interesting how much worse the book Morse is at passing as U and how much rougher around the edges he is

Wonder if this is down to Thaw not wanting to play it as Jack Regan in Oxford

those story lines tend to play up the "Morse as embittered outsider" angle and they didn't need to keep doing it

― you're a sick man, Buddy Rich (Noodle Vague), Wednesday, 9 August 2023 bookmarkflaglink

Don't think it needs those stories. What I like is the level of bitterness that John Thaw is pretty good at playing up (I've never seen him in anything else so I don't know what his range is) throughout. You've got this cultured, wannabe academic playing an inspector but I don't know if I could imagine him as lower ranked officer. It's like he is a civil servant, just 'fast tracked' into this role.

Morse is a very odd confection, Oxford is full of reminders of this other life he could've led and did not. But he never left.

that range in full:

https://pbs.twimg.com/profile_images/2551254876/vqvetz2g12aox7dkgo92_400x400.jpeg

Let's not forget...

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/0/08/Home_to_Roost.jpeg

Angry, embittered and indignant was definitely what John Thaw was best at.

He has a small role in The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner (1962) - twenty years old, but already looking older:

https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj-qNnatnvmyrgtAqRPb-0i26Ty8BAwcg5PdHKH9UASDiR0_RupwXHTTPOBpHaJ2TNxMZ2hm-UY0b9JlGIxQd601T4zgIb97oXamyq0XsPQSuP_b4juQcEHidoMsxGUqTmxnKH7vC4X08sL9nYnsf5nIg2yaCvDmnRtP92zj1P9ZjpxqdVHsaidyI4cng/s2147/Screen%20Shot%202022-10-20%20at%2011.22.41%20PM.jpeg

driven to distraction is abt misogyny in the motortrade and catching a serial killer: patrick malahide delivers a strongly nasty performance and they encounter several lesser creeps beside the killer, but the main team are just not themselves at all -- morse breaking regs all over the shop, lewis throwing strops abt this, strange, well ok strange is his normal self lol. prime suspect wasn't till the following year so i guess the relevant stakes weren't really been raised yet in terms of quotidian sexism on the force hobbling this kind of investigiation (inc.bringing in mary jo randle as a copper seconded precisely to deal with such matters, a role she took to the bill a couple of years later) -- but acknowledging that just leaves you thinking how much this ep doesn't get it. so it ends up an ugly oddity somehow -- tho apparently a popular one…

the masons-mozart ep is extremely goofy; lewis's joy at being asked to use a computer is excellent stuff

appreciate Morse having a nemesis who would've been used to death in post-HBO tv but not here thankfully

that's probably one of the reasons i got so into these shows, they're mercifully low on story arcs

great reveal when we see who it actually is lol

morse: imperial phase

another character actor i enjoy tho without googling i remember him from late period Dennis Potter and i think he might have been the lad that ended up playing the Star Wars emperor?

my nemesis is none other than darth Icky

hey, if Alec Guinness had no regrets then no wait

haha sam kelly unsurprisingly terrific as the ghostwriter-hack in "second time around"

if you'd told me that 1962 John Thaw was a 52 year old man i wouldn't have disbelieved it for a second.

oddly enough he really reminds me in that photo of a close friend i had at college who died young: i never knew what he looked like at 30 let along 52 :|

not a connection i ever made before, it's the curly hair framing the forehead

Are there any actual "good" episodes of Morse with a solid mystery, or at least solid narrative momentum, not just thesps yelling and crying and two-minute, single-camera shots of a Jaguar parking on a gravel path for atmos?

That might be an unfair remeberance, I speak as someone who remembers Morse as a ten-year-old who wished ITV still showed Magnum PI instead

ive just reached halfway in the rewatch (season five of eight) so im hesitant to be all grand-gesture "in conclusion" yet but i'd say that the stories so far are always solid-mystery-shaped without ever quite being classic solid mysteries, and that's bcz everyone involved is seizing on the opportunity to cram in other stuff: including settings and cute shots, opera joeks, being jampacked with off-the-ball hints for rewatch nerds with a pause button, stunt performances and cameos, topical social commentary, ageless wisdom™️, and the relentless comedy stylings of the morse&lewis duo…

result is that it swerves around a great deal tonally between eps and every ep is a bit of a mess one way and another. it can certainly be diverting -- more so than poirot, say, at least for me, which i always lose interest in, tho less than geraldine mcewan in goblin-mode -- but it is as often just exasperating: its ambitious notions flubbed and its many bids for bleak relevance outmanoevred (e.g. by frost, which is in some ways its smarter twin)

watched: the one with child murder, sam kelly, that fellow darth vader chokes as a fiery copper morse dislikes
watching: the one with women vicars and a miracle slimming product

wait no, it's the fellow who takes *over* from the fellow darth vader chokes (too much morse-darkside crossover is confusing )

"bit holier than thou"
"she IS holier than thou lewis!"

exchange is funny but could just as well have happpened in the other direction

the women vicars ep is probably the one i've enjoyed the most so far -- the clash of values (crusty trad weirdos vs the politically energetic, blended into a plot abt a dodgy think-thin cult) hovers between nicely serious and satire, and if the slimming stuff wd probably be handled a little more delicately today it still basically has its heart in the right place. also morse probably gets a first-date um sleepover w/zoe wanamaker (tho it's careful to keep the notion deniable) and a cheroot-smoking and be-cassocked maggie o'neill at one point does an effervescent cartwheel across the college lawn, which was i suspect unscripted…

the pacing and tonal movement both work well -- for once it gets all its various content- and form-ducks in a row. the one misstep is maybe the title (fat chance), which is a bit lazily brutal and also IMO misleading

eileen way as mrs papas in greeks bearing gifts -- none more greeek but she was born in new malden

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/F2OfLd9WwAAXDXP?format=jpg

https://i.imgur.com/8HYNNeA.png

better photo (not from morse):

https://www.regisautographs.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/09/Scan-68-e1570209156116.jpeg

this entire thread is

choice incomprehensible posts from britisher threads

for me

x-post

She looks a bit like Jiddu Krishnamurti in the ‘better photo’.

anyway for sleeve's sake this one is abt richard and judy, taped bouzouki music in crappy restaurants and reconstructed triremes, and i competely forgot to talk abt the one before, which is abt art and fakes

(and they're both good: we have entered a strong stretch)

the bouzouki one has a bit of a silly ending

the ep with marmalade atkins and martin clunes is annoying garbage

(and i've missed some out that i watched)

i will do a catch-up when it's less hot and i can think

alun armstrong as a "senior copper who's an idiot" role, which (a) makes no sense (the role doesn't add up) and (b) is in any case a complete waste of armstrong >:(

"are you always so churlish inspector?"

GOOD QUESTION

everyone enunciating very poshly this ep (largely set in a prison): everyone except lewis but INCLUDING SEAN BEAN

is phil davis in that one?

yup in fact it is jampacked with well known faces

(PD also speaks posh-ish; tbf jim broadbent maintains a mild non-posh inflection alongside lewis)

watching the satanism ep and morse is being even more insufferably arsey than usual telling ppl who staff a hospital for the criminally insane what their job is

ok possibly "not letting one of the criminally insane escape" is a part of their job they just effed up but

can't tell if keith allen is deftly fashioning a character or thinks that's how ppl actually say "shaman" and "charlatan"

as it's a bank holiday i'm subjecting myself to an endeavour X[

lol it's trying to be le carré

plus there's a highly unconvincing sidestory abt race and gangs and voodoo

back at the satanist morse story: keith allen in a bushy fake moustache sat outside a pub supping a beer and reading the london a-z like a novel

this is not a good episode

i never enjoyed that episode, it feels badly constructed as well as silly

lol i hadn't even got to the wildly silly scene

https://www.filmtipps.at/kritiken/The_Devil_rides_out/thumbs/The_Devil_rides_out_2.jpg

gwladys probert

actress welshing it up to the max

show always improved when the pathologist is
(a) a woman (dr hobson) who
(b) doesn't take morse's ridiculous shit

(max was also good, for the same reason)

even so the plot-tic that morse is the only faintly adequate copper in the country remains annoying

lol they shd have called this show HECATOMB

show always improved when the pathologist is
(a) a woman (dr hobson) who
(b) doesn't take morse's ridiculous shit

(max was also good, for the same reason)

― mark s, Friday, 1 September 2023 bookmarkflaglink

I would to re-watch more but this makes me realise the only characters that took no shit were the 'educated' sorts.

i imagine it's different in the original books but there's not really a coherent throughline of class politics or anything else in the show: even the way long-term characters interact swerves just wildly between episodes

but yes it is almost entirely about chaos and competition within the professional layers

it's just funnier when he doesn't get his way

sir clixby bream

(tremendous slimy performance from richard briers)

oh dear i've reached the ep that is set in victorian oxford which morse is solving while in a narcotic dream in a hospital bed

maybe it will not be terrible

i have bad news

OMG, never even knew such a ridiculous thing existed

i have a very vague memory of something like this occurring in a book-detective series -- like a break from the present to dig into the past -- where it maybe worked a bit better? but i can't remember which detective so making the comparison is a bit bogus really

the daughter of time?

doesn’t work that well in that tbh.

haven't read it and not what i had in mind -- if i had anything at all -- but yes!

(lewis sat this one out btw)

(he made the right decision)

actually what i might be thinking of is a tv reinvestigation of the ripper murders which i saw in 1973: the faces fronting it were barlow and watt (stratford johns and frank windsor) of z cars and then softly softly

i remember my dad having to explain to me what "poses plastique" were, something abt a male brothel (i don't recall why this was relevant; maybe he didn't explain that)

anyway it's 50 years since i saw that but i think it was better than this is

it was a half season of shite in the sopranos is what i remember

last ever ep

morse: "you know you really should persevere with wagner, lewis, it's about IMPORTANT THINGS"

lewis going off when the woman suspect says "Morse will understand" That's INSPECTOR Morse.

at least he had strange with him when he went

so i started watching endeavour from the start bcz in the evening after a day's work i am always fatigued ftb beta blockers and demanding TV is no longer for me :(

mostly it sucks MIGHTILY (very badly written) but in this ep (no 3 in all: rocket) YUNG MORSE caused the girl he's currently interested in laugh when he called a disco a "pop dancing club" (ep set in 1965) -- that was actually a good line and a good exchange, where the anachronism is the great man's callow error not the scriptwriter's

One I saw was set the week of the 1966 world cup final and I peaced out pretty quick

"Would you bring Greaves back into the side Morse?" fuck off

Morse would refuse to watch because Ramsey wasn't playing wingers.

2 ("fugue") was abt a serial killer playing fiendish games in codes that only an advanced musical brain could ever crack ("every good boy deserves favour")

i don't mind shaun evans -- very watchable -- but so far i hate his oh-i-just-cracked-this scene and pray it is not going to be a fixture

academic misuses "refute" in 1965* -- not very likely but might have happened?
an angry morse not jumping scornfuly on the solecism -- would absolutely not have happened lol

*it's not a synonym for "deny": to refute you must supply the proof

oh-i-just-cracked-this scene and pray it is not going to be a fixture

oh no

(very dislikeable) character mentions the new left review while teasing morse (it's 1966 so ilx's beloved perry anderson is editor) #onethread

this is the silliest stuff

now watching the world cup ep: it also features chopin and heraldry plus a haunted girls school that's very picnic at hanging rock when it's not harry potter

getting unrelated topics to clash fruitfully is a morsey thing tho i think it fails at this more often than it succeeds and i don't have high hopes for this

scooby-doo-ass garbage

gotta hand it to em, sway was a pretty good ep, maybe it's finding its feet!

(i mean still p silly in some ways, but also quite affecting and the anachronism kept in check for a change)

(i like the one-word titles btw, that's a nice tic)

deems said this show got better and in s3 it has, which is nice

is there another drama which wd open with a close-up of a man deploying MOLE TRAPS on a well kept lawn, i think not

the mole trap man is in fact lozza's dad :|

a hathaway

ok that was the silliest story i have ever watched, mole traps or no mole traps

Do you think Fox's breakdown into whatever he is now was precipitated by expecting to replace Kevin Whateley as the main guy in the franchise and they're all like, lol no, we're gonna do heartbeat morse instead

it can't have helped that they included his character's dad as a completely inconsequential walk-on character (who doesn't even get to be a red herring)

history of Loz's life tbf

this record is ok but it's no "l'amour"

https://head-records.bandcamp.com/album/beliefs-destroyer

i know, i haven't thought of "l'amour" in about a decade either

I bet it's better than this...

https://laurencefox.bandcamp.com/album/a-grief-observed

... OMG I just listened to it!

this is the stuff:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=41KgNJ9qGDI

"next time you see my name it'll be on page one!"

things not say say on endeavour

the ep that combines a mary whitehouse-alike with a pink floyd-alike and a gay news-alike* (plus a simon dee-alike) has a moment where morse is harrumphing abt rock criticism

my usual beef: huge surges of anachronism poorly steered thru but lol his actual crit (of a mode of interviewing and writing that didn't really exist yet in 1967) is not inaccurate! though its problems go more to the difficulties of self-taight musicians getting across to non-musicians how music gets collectively put together, than to the brainlessness he prefers to think it (never change lonely grumpy high-culture dude, yr instincts are good but their expressive framework is terrible)

*it compresses the gay news prosecution of 1977 (for blasphemy) into the oz prosecution of 1970 (for obscenity)

decriminalisation only took place in 1967; gay news was in fact founded in 1972 and an equivalent would hardly have needed a mary whitehouse-alike to get it shut it down five years earlier

how much does all this matter (besides driving me the actual person watching very bonkers)?

sylvestra le touzel is p good as the whitehouse-alike lady tho -- she does the accent as a full thatcher, which is cheeky but nevertheless effective

also it gets into the toxicity of LSD *and* the vagaries of copyright law and who wrote what 👍🏽👍🏽👍🏽

i’ve been watching the original inspector morse series and it’s wild how much pussy this guy gets pic.twitter.com/TAZGIHqpBj

— Brandy Jensen (@BrandyLJensen) September 24, 2023

phil daniels klaxon (thursday's brother)

(also thursday i guess)

chekov's minefeld lol

i have hugely come round on this daft nonsense (endeavour)

(w/its relentless commitment to tackling the most serious historical matter in the goofiest possible anachro-historical context)

the ep set in a public school is kind of a rip of le carre's a murder of quality iirc (which is lol NOT his best book) and the only bits i'm enjoying in are the (v short) exchanges where morse, a copper sneaked in as a suubstitute classics teacher, discusses authors like ovid or suetonius with his pupils. it's not convincing especially, it's just funny

it's the late 60s but here's one of (real) teachers describes a punished child as being "under heavy manners" -- a phrase that entered normie english via rockpaper-chat courtesy a prince far-i album title c. 1977 (and beyind that, according to jonathon green's dictionary of slang, from jamaican political manoeuvring… )

the scriptwriters just have a permanent tin ear for conversation of the exact period they're trying to recreate and as someone who lived through it it is just exhausting

i ended up watching most of an episode on Friday night, mainly because of this thread tickling my inclination - it was the one that ends up with Morse and Friday in Venice toting guns, it was as silly as fuck but it was the good entertainting kind of silly (which is most silly) tbf

i mean i have not given up in disgust 🤣 i am carrying on (despite the disgust)

i never ignored it because of daftness, it was more about not being tonally satisfying, but i'm coming round to the idea of it being v satisfying because of the daftness. like the other serieses

the gunplay shd probably get the fuck out tho

it's often a complete mess but it can be quite ambitious in unexpected ways (which i like) -- the anachronistic speech stuff grates bcz i am just the age to catch the worst of it somehow but i imagine bothers nearly no one else

"Paper says soviet tanks in Prague, Morse"

<Morse, sucks teeth> "Pussssy'oles"

in the years since Endeavour started that kind of anachronism has been claimed as a feature not bug cf Cheeky Blinkers and its ilk

and for better or worse they didn't adopt the "shit 80s indie background music" trope

morse shd be listening to adam and the ants the entire time (as shd we all)

time for the killer to be a thunderbirds puppet

"the pelican man!"

very good and funny scene

"i am a bagman not a yesman!"

morse somewhat shakily referencing the climax of michael clayton to explain why he shd *not* be taken off the case

endeavour s8 and it's roughly 1972 i believe: i wouldn't expect *everyone's* hair to be long -- it didn't really happen like that -- but it's funny that the one character whose locks are descending faintly collar-wards is the recently widowed chief superintendent bright :)

"it's a rum caper!" (thursday on the craft of acting, which he appears never to have encountered until now)

lol just checking out a character ("lord ormsby-gore") who features in this ep bcz it seemed like vaguely actionable (?) to include a real-named person as potentially a killer (ep not over, no spoilers!) and either way a total dipshit

and the actual real person with rouhgly this name and title at this moment (david ormsby-gore, 5th lord harlech) died in a traffic accident in the village next to the village i grew up in, almost certainly in a near-legendary traffic blackspot which the family (ours not the OGs) had to negotiate on a daily basis

(we weren't involved though, i'd already left home officer)

the younger ormsby-gores were famously all over the rolling stones -- and worse, eric clapton -- at this time (1972) and things didn't go well for them really

(harlech died in 1985, in case you want a test)

i am and have been right about endeavour and it is correct to say so

the anachronisms or incorrect details are certainly a feature and not a bug the entire thing is as daft as dr who but infinitely better because the casting and production quality and attention to (wholly incorrect) detail and the nods and flourishes are all deeply enjoyable and satisfying

i want a full season of joly for short

just discovered that Max is also the guy who voiced Gollum in the Bakshi LotR and dubbed Pigsy in the (quite annoying) UK dub of Monkey

:O

subs not dubs! (sorry max)

Was also the original Estragon (Peter Hall's 1955 production)!