Endeavour, the television prequel to Inspector Morse, was first broadcast on ITV in 2012, with the final episode coming in 2023. Written by Russell Lewis, it’s been an entertaining and witty show, with a great soundtrack and some jokey cultural references. It’s also provided a potted history of Britain between 1965 and 1972, when society wasn’t as decent and liberal as we are now.
Here’s a guide to what we learn in each of the 36 episodes.
1965
‘Endeavour’
Two years on from the Profumo scandal and, explains a chap from Special Branch: ‘We’re still going round with a dustpan and brush.’ So when there are stories of a sex scandal in establishment circles in Oxford, involving a Labour MP and underage girls, there’s an attempt to close down the investigation. World War II veteran DI Thursday is having none of it: ‘I didn’t march halfway across the world to put Jerry back in his box for jumped-up spivs to end up running the show at home.’ There’s a male don who’s up to no good, carrying on with a young girl.
‘Girl’
So how do we feel about nuclear weapons? I ask because there’s a very respectable don with a controversial past: he worked on developing the atom bomb. He says he regrets it now, but some don’t think his remorse means anything. ‘You kill one person, they lock you up and throw away the key,’ argues a student. ‘You kill 300,000 and they give you a knighthood.’ And maybe he’s right, because the don in question isn’t a very nice piece of work, definitely up to no good. A vicar is murdered.
‘Fugue’
There’s a multiple murderer on the loose, a novel kind of killer, highly intelligent, showy enough that all the deaths are linked by operatic references, and apparently motiveless. ‘Killing for the sheer hell of it? That’s something new,’ says DI Thursday. What triggered this particular psychopath? It was the behaviour of an American general during the war: over-sexed, over-paid and… well, it was bound to cause trouble. A lower-middle-class couple have just had a pink bathroom-suite fitted.
‘Rocket’
Princess Margaret is in town ‘to promote British overseas exports,’ i.e. she’s helping an arms company flog missiles to the Arabs. The proposed deal is about ‘our country, our place in the world’. Regrettably, there’s a handful of extremists, utterly lacking in patriotism and deference, who choose to demonstrate outside. ‘Abolish the Monarchy’ read the slogans on their placards; ‘Citizen not Subject’. There are health and safety issues in the factory as well. And troubles with the workers. ‘The union is always threatening action,’ says the company chairman. ‘A fact of modern business life.’ A female worker complains about the men pawing at her, but the union shop steward isn’t interested. An old-established family-firm is struggling to remain competitive.
‘Home’
It’s not just the odd don this time, there’s a whole common room of them who are up to no good, working with corrupt council officials and a gangster-owned property firm to sell off some land. Those in authority try to close down sensitive lines of enquiry. ‘We wouldn’t want murder standing in the way of profit!’ snorts DI Thursday. Not all the dons are dodgy though. One of them was on the side of virtue until he was murdered. Turns out he was ‘a conchie in the last show’.
1966
‘Trove’
There’s a by-election, and Barbara Batten is defending a tiny Labour majority left over from the general election. She’s an admirable woman, but her husband’s a right wrong ‘un: bigamy, incest, murder – not even his brother Masons are going to get him out of the mess he’s made. Happily, the candidate’s daughter takes after her mother, not her father. She’s a student who also wants to change the world, though she doesn’t think parliament is going to deal with the problems women face: ‘Do you know how many women are beaten or die in this country each week at the hands of their boyfriends or husbands?’ The girl’s tutor is unconvinced by her attitude: ‘Nothing a good spanking wouldn’t cure.’
‘Nocturne’
‘It all started in India around 1850,’ explains DC Morse. A British tea-planter had an illegitimate son with an Indian woman, later bringing the boy back to Oxfordshire, passing him off as an orphaned child of a loyal officer killed in the Mutiny. As a teenager, the boy, bitter at being disowned, went on a killing-spree, slaughtering his father and four other members of his unacknowledged family with a croquet mallet. There are murderous ramifications in the present, of course. But maybe we should heed the words of a young Anglo-Indian girl: ‘My father says that the Raj was a long injustice, but if it had not existed, then neither would I. The past can only hurt us if we let it.’
‘Sway’
Men who served in the army during the war – they don’t like to speak about it, do they? Not even to their wives. ‘He never talked about it, and I know better than to ask,’ says Mrs Thursday. Fighter pilots, on the other hand, never shut up about it.
‘Neverland’
There are plans for a new police headquarters, accompanied by corrupt councillors taking backhanders from a property developer. As DI Church says, it’s nothing new: ‘Town Hall graft. Came in with the Ark, didn’t it?’ But there’s a conspiracy far bigger and darker than that. One that involves child abuse at Blenheim Vale Boys’ Home, a correctional institution closed some time ago. Needless to say, there are those in positions of power who want to close down any investigation.
1967
‘Ride’
There have always been rich young people with a self-destructive edge, existing somewhere between daredevilry and decadence. Here they are again, and this time they’re kitted out with Chinese heroin, records by the Velvet Underground, and a disdain for titles: ‘It’s all terribly egalitarian with the bluebloods these days.’ But there’s still an emptiness in their lives. ‘Make me feel something,’ pleads Lady Belborough. ‘Anything.’ As it happens, the problems come from those who aren’t born into privilege, the social climbers. ‘The world has changed,’ says one. ‘You can be anything you want.’
‘Arcadia’
The times they are a-changing. There’s an avant-garde artist with violent tendencies, and the aborting of a mixed-race baby. There are civil rights campaigners and demonstrators against Ian Smith’s regime in Rhodesia. There’s also a commune, set up by young folk, and DI Thursday doesn’t approve. ‘Pot and free love?’ he scorns. ‘In my experience that’s the most expensive kind there is.’ Meanwhile, posh white students throw an innocent black man into the river.
‘Prey’
‘Oi! No radios!’ snaps a park-keeper at a young courting couple. ‘It’s a family park, not a monkey-house.’ Parkies are a very definite type. Always reactionary, they are. ‘Long hair! Can’t tell the boys from the girls these days. National Service, that’s what they want.’ This one falls foul of DI Thursday, who beats him up in custody. Chief Superintendent Bright chooses to cover up the assault, reporting that ‘Hodges fell down the steps on the way back to his cell’.
‘Coda’
Say what you like about Oxford, you get a better class of blue movie there: titles like Mucky Beth, Moaning Becomes Electra, Hedda Gobbler. Mind you, the dons are dodgy as hell. There’s one here busy selling degrees; he’s so far crossed the line that he’s even prepared to take advantage of his old student, DC Morse. No sense of honour, these days.
‘Game’
‘Oi! No petting!’ snaps the attendant at the swimming pool. Nice to see that some things remain constant, because elsewhere it’s all change as we start to feel that white heat of technology that we’d been promised. A Russian chess-player loses to a computer; the postmaster general, Tony Benn, is introducing postcodes; and the BBC is broadcasting Wimbledon in colour. ‘It’s quite lifelike,’ reckons DSgt Strange of this last development.
‘Canticle’
Mrs Joy Pettybon is a moral reformer, setting her face against the modern world. ‘The permissive society? Well, no one asked my permission.’ She campaigns for standards in broadcasting: ‘We object to the disbelief, the doubt and the dirt through the television screen and through the wireless.’ (‘Or the radio, as we tend to call it nowadays,’ corrects a trendy young TV presenter, with a knowing smirk at the audience.) Personally, she’s a nasty piece of work, sanctimonious, deceitful and deeply unsympathetic. Not even decent-minded, middle-aged women take to her. ‘Telling people what they should and shouldn’t,’ tuts Mrs Thursday. ‘She just likes the sound of her own voice.’ DI Thursday turns out to be no stranger to smoking pot, having encountered it ‘up the desert. They called it kif out there.’
‘Lazaretto’
Mrs Thursday isn’t feeling herself. It’s her nerves, it’s getting so she’s frightened when she leaves the house. So the doctor prescribes her tranquillisers. Well, you’ve got to trust health professionals, haven’t you? Though there’s a surgeon here with a bad case of the shakes, who ought to retire but won’t. And another who’s responsible for a couple of deaths through his negligence. Oh, and a nurse who’s a serial killer. Maybe we shouldn’t trust health professionals, after all.
‘Harvest’
You’ll remember the Cuban Missiles Crisis around the time of the autumnal equinox in 1962. What you probably don’t remember is the leak from Bramford nuclear power station at the same time, because that was hushed up by the powers-that-be. But you can’t just bury things like that; they’ll come back to haunt you. And there’s definitely trouble coming, according to a wise woman who lives in the woods; there have been signs: ‘A lamb with two heads was born in the spring.’
1968
‘Muse’
We’ve all heard of the Bullingdon Club, of course, a boys’ dining and drinking club for rich, would-be decadent students at Oxford. Well, it turns out that the dons are no better. They have their own club, the Berserkers. ‘Just a bunch of like-minded fellows, making merry,’ simpers one member. ‘The sole proviso of membership is one must be a gentleman of quality.’ Their dinners are riotous affairs. ‘Everything smashed to pieces,’ shudders the manager of a hotel. ‘What they did to the pig’s head centrepiece…’ Then they gave the owner a massive cheque and swanned off.
‘Sounds like a collection of absolute philistines,’ concludes Chief Superintendent Bright in distaste, and DCI Thursday doesn’t approve either: ‘A bunch of middle-aged academics prancing about in pretty waistcoats calling each other daft names.’ It turns out worse than that, though, when a woman who was gang-raped by the club begins taking her revenge.
‘Cartouche’
Things are going badly wrong. An arson attack on a house that’s providing shelter for six families of Kenyan Asians; a brick thrown at the window of a community centre. DCI Thursday thinks it’s the locals. ‘What little bit of bugger-all they do have, they’re worried about losing to foreigners,’ he says, and Chief Super Bright is horrified: ‘These people are British subjects.’ He’s had a leaflet through his own door, with the slogan: ‘Would you let your daughter marry a darkie?’ It’s Enoch Powell’s fault, he reckons.
Meanwhile, an Egyptian academic (working at the Pitt Rivers Museum, natch) disapproves of the West’s attitudes to his culture. ‘Bad enough our treasures have for centuries been plundered by Europeans,’ he says. Now there are hammy horror movies about mummies and curses; they’re inappropriate for these serious times. ‘My country’s at war with Israel. A situation you British created.’ But DSgt Strange doesn’t think much to him: ‘We’ve all met that type. Chip on the shoulder a mile wide.’
‘Passenger’
There’s a groovy little boutique in Oxford these days. Alice’s Marmalade Cat, it’s called, and the man who runs it is a groovy cat himself: ‘When it comes to crumpet, I’m not a guy that has to try. You know what I mean?’ Also, there’s been a heist; DC Fancy has a black man in the frame, but struggles to convince others. ‘They haven’t got it up here for that kind of caper,’ reckons a sergeant from the robbery squad, tapping the side of his head. ‘Lorry load of Scotch and fags? That’s white man’s mischief.’ The Black and White Minstrels are on TV. Mrs Thursday likes them.
‘Colours’
The Oxford Union is debating immigration and repatriation. Proposing the motion is Charity Mudford, widow of one of the leaders of the British Union of Fascists. She’s a posh sort; you can tell because her butler irons her copy of the Daily Telegraph. Her stepdaughter, though, is going out with a black activist, Marcus X, until she’s murdered by a racist. Campaigners demonstrate outside a hair salon that has a sign in the window saying ’No coloureds’. The proprietor isn’t prejudiced, though, as she points out: ‘I went to see Sammy Davis Jr in Golden Boy at the Palladium only three months back, so I think that speaks volumes.’
A light infantry regiment is just about to disappear, as a wave of amalgamations sweeps over the army. It doesn’t really matter, reflects DCI Thursday: ‘It’s people make something what it is, not the name it’s called by.’ Oh, and there’s a don who’s up to no good.
‘Quartet’
It’s the Cold War, two months on from the tanks rolling into Prague. There are agents and double-agents, and betrayals and assassinations, and guns disguised as umbrellas, and there are wheels within wheels within wheels… But Special Branch are all over the story, and they’ve slapped a D-notice on it. So I really can’t tell you any more.
‘Icarus’
A Latin teacher has gone missing from a boys’ private school called Coldwater – known as St Bastard’s to the staff – a violent place of bullying, corporal punishment and hard drugs. The teacher who runs the cadets has no time for ‘lily-livered sissies’, or for immigration (‘taking rubbish from half the places we used to run’), and he wears a Union Jack badge with the slogan ‘Make Britain Greater’. The local gangland boss sends his son here, though the better-bred boys (the likes of Clunchfist, Gaudibund and Rackway) regard him as an oik. It’s the kind of place where a boy, bullied beyond endurance, might take it into his head to start shooting, probably on the fiftieth anniversary of Armistice Day. DCI Thursday doesn’t approve of the place: ‘Happiest days of your life? Not much happiness here.’
1969
‘Pylon’
Used to be that it was debauched young aristos who listened to the Velvet Underground; now you can hear their records being played in grubby squats, where the sofas are littered with stoned drop-outs and there’s a stench of Red Leb in the air. Not that posh folk are any better: there’s one here with a stash of opium and laudanum, and a taste for recreating Lewis Carroll’s photographs of young girls. Five police forces have been amalgamated to create the Thames Valley Constabulary, complete with modern offices and a typing pool. There’s a vicar, but he doesn’t get murdered.
‘Apollo’
Dons are odd folk, aren’t they? Often up to no good, of course, but also so deeply insecure. They indulge in wife-swapping key-parties, and they’re susceptible to the latest fads and follies: catharsis therapy is all the rage these days. Still, that’s the modern world for you, the kind of thing you expect now we’re in the Space Age, marvelling at men landing on the Moon, while the kids watch the TV puppet show Moon Rangers (‘a kind of Bonanza in space’). On a more down-to-earth note, the new Thames Valley offices have modern carpet-tiles, which generate static electricity. ‘What’s wrong with lino?’ DI Thursday wants to know. His daughter, Joan, has a new look; it’s ‘very “Soviet milk yields are up this quarter, comrade”,’ suggests DSgt Morse.
‘Confection’
Villages are hotbeds of gossip, backbiting and long-held grudges. Anyone who’s read Agatha Christie knows that. It’s just the same here. ‘The looks. The sly stares. People looking down their noses,’ says one victim of the wagging tongues. And – again as Agatha Christie readers will know – it’s all destined to end in violence. Rather reassuring that, even in these modern times, some things remain so solid and reliable. DI Thursday doesn’t approve of the village: ‘What a place!’ An old-established family-firm is struggling to remain competitive.
‘Degüello’
‘Homes fit for habitation’. That’s what the council promised, and Cranmer House (‘A Home in the Sky’) was the flagship development. But, to the surprise of no one who read about the Ronan Point collapse last year, Cranmer House proves structurally unsound: within a year of being built, a gas explosion brings a whole side of it crashing down, killing dozens. It’s probably because a corrupt councillor was on a scam, working in cahoots with a gangster-run construction firm. Senior figures in the police and the Lodge close ranks to protect the guilty.
There’s a don who’s up to no good, taking smutty books out from the restricted collection at the Bodleian Library, stealing another’s work, and betraying foreign colleagues to totalitarian regimes.
1970
‘Oracle’
It’s a new decade with new foods: chicken in a basket, scampi in a basket. There are also new career opportunities, for dons at least; hundreds of scientists – some fuddy-duddy, some simply shabby – audition to present the Open University’s Higher Maths module. Instead, the TV people give the gig to an attractive young woman. A crusty old don doesn’t agree with this sort of thing: ‘Women are too emotional for the life scientific,’ he says. (‘That’ll come as grave news to Madame Curie,’ retorts DSgt Morse.) He also refuses to go along with the fad for wives to have their own cheque-book. And the Lord knows what he thinks of this women’s conference that’s being held at Ruskin College, with a creche run by males. It’s enough to drive a man to murder. And the way men behave is enough to drive a women to murder, as well.
A body is found by ‘a keep-fit fanatic’, an early example of what will become (if TV is to be believed) an everyday occurrence: the jogger who stumbles upon a canal-side corpse on an early-morning run. Mind you, you need to keep your wits about you with these keep-fit types: they’re not always right in the head.
‘Raga’
There’s a general election coming. A British Movement candidate named Martin Gorman talks of the country being ‘swamped’, and promises ‘British jobs for British workers’ (thereby pre-empting two future prime ministers). ‘This is our country,’ he says. ‘Let’s take it back.’ Inspired by his rhetoric, a racist gang stabs a young Asian lad to death in the street. And a delivery driver for the Jolly Rajah restaurant is killed. Unsurprisingly, some Asians don’t feel welcome: ‘This country, it’s not a place for us. They don’t want us here.’ And just as unsurprisingly, some take reprisals and kill a white lad in revenge. Maybe we should heed the words of a young Asian woman: ‘All this anger, all this violence and all this hatred – in the end, it defeats only itself.’
DSgt Strange tries to follow TV chef Oberon Prince with his recipe for Tournedos Rossini, ‘finished in a madeira demi-glaze sauce’. Which only goes to show how sophisticated we are these days; when Prince started on TV fifteen years back, ‘most people had never heard of vinaigrette’. Mrs Thursday prefers the wrestling, though she might be surprised to learn that Adam ‘Dangerman’ Sloane – one of the biggest stars on the circuit – is a homosexual. It’s pretty obvious, says Sloane: ‘We get paid to roll about with blokes wearing only our underpants.’ But there are other ways of seeing the wrestling, with its simple storylines of heroes and villains. ‘Just like the opera,’ reckons DCI Thursday.
‘Zenana’
‘Of the nearly forty colleges in Oxford, only five are open to women.’ So why should Lady Matilda’s, a women-only college, become co-educational? That’s what some Matildabeests want to know. What some of the male dons want to know, on the other hand, is why girls are so touchy these days. One can’t even make a simple joke about not getting many to the pound when one finds oneself – inadvertently, I do assure you, dear boy, inadvertently – clutching at a lady’s breast.
1971
‘Striker’
Football’s gone to the dogs, hasn’t it? There’s too much money in it these days, too many commercial interests to promote, and the players are little more than show ponies, committed to fashion as much as to football. None of which excuses the racial abuse suffered by the star striker of Oxford Wanderers, who’s both Northern Irish and mixed-race. Let alone the phoned threat from the Provisional IRA that they’re planning to kill him. Except it turns out it’s not the IRA, it’s the Loyalists, engaged in a false-flag operation. ‘You think it’s just the other side deals in guns and bombs?’ asks a young Protestant woman. ‘The Order, the Twelfth, the pipes and drums. Them hating us, us hating them.’
There’s another false flag when a parcel bomb turns out not to be the work of the Angry Brigade after all. ‘Is this what it’s come to?’ despairs Chief Super Bright. ‘Gunmen roaming the streets, political violence?’ DCI Thursday can give no reassurance: ‘It’s war. Undeclared, perhaps, but war all the same.’
Meanwhile, there are concerns about an Oxford college taking money from an arms manufacturer. ‘Be wary of judging the past by modern morals,’ a don tells one protestor, ‘lest your own enlightened virtues one day fall from fashion.’ Wise words, except that it turns out the don’s up to no good; he’s in league with a dodgy property developer.
‘Scherzo’
It appears that 8mm films, such as Sinner for Three, are available by mail order for a pound a copy. ‘Pornography? That’s not Oxford business. That’s London business,’ says DSgt Strange (having forgotten that Hedda Gobbler ever existed). ‘A hour’s run up the A40 makes it everybody’s business,’ replies DCI Thursday. And indeed this stuff is coming from the capital – from the Met Police’s Dirty Books Squad, to be precise; the squad is corrupt and is purveying porn to the provinces.
When a black driver is promoted to run a minicab office, the first thing he does is take down the nude pin-up pictures. In a sign of the times, a nudist camp is doing good business. ‘People running around with no clothes on,’ shudders Gwen Morse. ‘It’s squalid.’ Getting in early for the rock ‘n’ roll revival (or possibly just enjoying rock ‘n’ roll for the first time), DSgt Strange and Joan Thursday dance to ‘Earth Angel’ at the Freemasons’ Ladies’ Night; in the raffle, they win tickets to see the Carpenters performing in London, and agree that Karen has a lovely voice. A vicar is murdered.
‘Terminus’
DCI Thursday is puzzled by what’s happening in Northern Ireland. ‘We went in to keep people safe,’ he says, but now it’s escalating, with each outrage provoking another. ‘Reprisals – I thought we’d done with all that.’ Mrs Thursday is desperately worried about their boy, who’s serving in Ulster. ‘He shouldn’t be out there. What’s it his business with these people? I mean, who are they to us?’
1972
‘Prelude’
The job of a virtuoso violinist isn’t easy; it requires sacrifice from an early age. ‘Other girls had friends, parties, fun. I had a rehearsal room.’ The job of a British soldier in Northern Ireland isn’t easy, either. ‘It’s not all “Roll Out the Barrel” and “Lili Marlene” any more,’ Sam Thursday explains, bitterly, to his dad. ‘The other side, they don’t wear a uniform. It’s the bloke stood next to you at the bar, the girl you get off with at the dance, a kid on a street corner.’
‘Uniform’
‘I don’t know what the world’s coming to,’ frets Chief Superintendent Bright. ‘Most days I barely recognise it at all.’ Admittedly, he’s been saying much the same thing for years now, but it really feels something has changed. Maybe it’s a reflection of popular culture. A gang of four decadent young aristos in masks walk down the street in slow motion, and later beat the living daylights out of a vagrant; it’s hard not to see the influence of A Clockwork Orange. Meanwhile the star of TV cop show Jolly for Short – based on the Jolyon Jolliphant novels of Kent Finn – turns out to be as dangerous as the real-life rozzers who continue to hush up the scandal of Blenheim Vale Boys’ Home. ‘It’s a rum caper,’ thinks DCI Thursday.
‘Exeunt’
These are tough times to be a conservative. There’s all the immigration, and the Pill and the homosexuals and the package holidays. And our politicians are little better than traitors, signing up to that European Community business. ‘Saying you were English used to be the greatest claim a man could make,’ reflects one man. ‘Now when people say it, it’s like there’s something to be ashamed about. Well, I’m not ashamed. I’m English and proud of it.’ And to prove it, he begins murdering dons – the socialist ones and the Marxist ones, the ones who write letters to the papers, spilling out their treacherous poison.
Meanwhile, Sam Thursday is frequenting a dodgy bar, the kind of place where they play Black Sabbath records on the juke box and bikers hang out. That doesn’t augur well. Bikers conduct blood feuds, as DSgt Strange points out: ‘These boys don’t take any prisoners.’
Still, at least our hero, DSgt Morse, has finally seen justice done in that Blenheim Vale business.
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