TS: Lewis vs Morse

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