TS: Lewis vs Morse

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

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)!