Two anniversaries, this month and next, for what is probably the
most intelligent cop show ever to hit the small screen.
One anniversary is to be celebrated. It was 25 years ago
this month that “The Dead of Jericho,” the first of 33 episodes of
the splendid Inspector Morse series was broadcast in 1987
in the UK. It was immediately popular in Old Blighty and remains so
in re-run today, more than a decade after the last new episode hit
the air. New Morse episodes routinely drew television
audiences of 15 million and more in a country of 60 million. Few
television series can truthfully be called a phenomenon.
Morse can.
Morse also played to enthusiastic
audiences when it migrated to the U.S. a year later, airing mostly
on PBS stations. By now Morse has been watched and enjoyed
in almost every country advanced enough to have a television
transmitter.
The second anniversary, in February, is a sad one. It will
mark 10 years from the too-early death of John Thaw, the talented
and versatile British actor who brought the quirky but
ever-fascinating Morse to life on the screen. Thaw lost his battle
with esophageal cancer just two years after the last new episode of
Morse was aired. He was only 60 at his death, though he
looked older. Not because of his illness, but because he was one of
those guys who looked 40 at 25 and turned gray in their
thirties.
Thaw appeared in several popular television series.
The Sweeny in the seventies and Kavanagh Q.C.
later had their fans. Of his movies, Goodnight, Mr. Tom
may be the best known. It’s the story of a cranky old-timer in a
small rural English town who makes an unexpected bond with a
youngster evacuated from London during the blitz. It’s a movie that
could have been saccharine in the hands of a lesser actor. Thaw
made it both moving and believable.
But Morse was Thaw’s triumph, his greatest
performance, and the role he will be most remembered for. The
character of Morse is compelling. The scripts are intelligent,
based on a series of award-winning novels by Colin Dexter as well
as some original television stories. The episodes are out of the
British mystery tradition with complex plots and lots of suspects
and red herrings. They’re two hours long and deal intelligently
with themes in the way good literature always has.
The series is beautifully filmed in and around photogenic
Oxford. The soundtrack alone — featuring the classical music that
the character Morse and Thaw personally loved — is worth the price
of admission. There’s hardly a rock or a rap riff to be heard in
the entire 33 episodes.
So Morse is not your standard “up against the
wall red-neck mother” (or UK equivalent thereof) cop opera where
comic cut-out bad guys are identified, chased, cursed, cuffed
around, and jugged, all in one hour with time out for commercials.
It’s a vast understatement to say the program went against
type.
The cop show standard for the eighties was series like the
alternately edgy and comic Hill Street Blues, or Miami
Vice, which featured fast cars, blaring rock music, great
looking babes (so it wasn’t a total loss), macho posturing on the
part of both cops and villains, and a lot of automatic weapons fire
as cops and cocaine cowboys battled it out while the good residents
of Dade County dove for cover.
So it’s easy to see how far out on a limb Ken McBain and
Ted Childs of Central Television went when they decided Brits were
ready for a cerebral, middle-aged, somewhat grumpy, intellectual
snob of a detective who, with his long-suffering sidekick Sergeant
Robbie Lewis, would take 100 minutes (two hours less commercials)
to solve complicated cases by hard detection with an absolute
minimum of car chases, fist fights, shoot-ups, gutter language, or
Andy Sipowicz style abuse of suspects. (I’m sure the ACLU has a
division just for Andy, a one-man assault on the Bill of
Rights.)
Morse and Lewis are hardly cream-puffs, but neither are
they the young stud muffins who supposedly appeal to the
demographic advertisers drool over. When Morse was first
broadcast Thaw was 45 and looked at least a decade older. At
critical times in the episodes Morse is more apt to quote poetry or
a line from one of Wagner’s operas than to fall into the flashy but
shallow dialogue of Crockett and Tubbs which made Miami
Vice a haven for the hip.
Even though Thaw’s Morse was far from the generic
30-something, tough guy, hunk of popular cop series, it seems that
many of the ladies have found Morse’s lonely persona attractive. I
had to laugh, as I read Thaw did, when more than one female
reviewer described Thaw as “the thinking woman’s bit of crumpet.”
Eat your heart out, Brad Pitt.
Inspector Morse was so far off from
anything that existed or could have been anticipated, I’m sure
reading the concept before Morse was aired would have made
a marketing major’s teeth hurt. Focus groups would have lost
consciousness. Morse fit no known niche, no expectation.
It was its own category. And it worked.
Morse works because it’s human drama
at the highest level. The makers of the show hired the best
writers, and some of Britain’s top actors appear in the episodes.
The characters are well drawn: The moody but intelligent Morse. The
down-to-earth Lewis (played by Kevin Whatley — who now has his own
first-rate series, Inspector Lewis). And the crusty but
reliable Detective Chief Superintendent Strange, played by James
Grout. Morse deals with the basic and unchanging issues of
the human condition, which is why it can still be watched with
profit today while Miami Vice and such-like series are
badly dated.
Morse is essentially apolitical. But
TAS readers will recognize in Morse a man who understands
the importance of the rule of law and justice, the interests of
which he always puts ahead of gain or personal advancement. Morse
is also a man impatient with neologisms and with the daffier
aspects of post-everything culture. He’s an independent old croc,
thoroughly comfortable with the old ways, as most TAS
readers would be comfortable with him.
The series — widely available for purchase, rent, or to
be checked out from public libraries — with its timeless
qualities, remains miles ahead of the general run found on today’s
cable packages. If you haven’t had the pleasure….
And while you’re watching, for the first time or as a
re-visit to a favorite episode, you might consider raising your
glass to John Thaw, a fine actor, taken at the height of his
dramatic powers.
RIP John Thaw. Long live Chief Inspector Morse.
