TS: Lewis vs Morse

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