TS: Lewis vs Morse

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".