"We were just saying you look very, um, off duty tonight..."
Inspector Morse, somehow more than any television programme of the era, beautifully evokes the many little nuances of the UK in the late 1980s. The cars. The telephones. The fact that middle aged people, the age I am now, would never be seen in jeans and t-shirt. The casual sexism. The existence of the stay-at-home housewife. Middle aged people speaking a kind of received pronunciation that these days is the preserve only of the very old. And, indeed, the lack of CCTV in multi-storey car parks.
The story, perhaps more than most in this third series, is nicely and subtly done. We build a picture of the murdered man- successful, arrogant, a womniser with no poetry in his soul- the polar opposite of Morse who, curmudgeon that he is, continues to pursue a rather sweet romance with Dr Russell, very much not the sort of thing one may expect of the cruder Morse of the novels.
The twists at the end, just at the point where it seems we may have run out of road, are very clever indeed- and it's nice that certain points are made subtly, with no need to force feed the viewer. Sex, greed, blackmail, fury, passion... it's all here. Life is messy, complicated, often dark... yet there is also art, music and good real ale. Morse's is a melancholy world, but not one without its comforts. Much like our own, perhaps.
No comments:
Post a Comment