Inspector Morse: The Secret of Bay 5B

 "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.

The Case-Book of Sherlock Holmes: The Problem of Thor Bridge

 "I'm falling into your involved habit of telling a story backward."

This is, surprisingly, one of the finest episodes of the Granada Sherlock Holmes series to date. Surrising, I suppose, partly because the popular Conan Doyle stories have all been done and that now, in the '90s and after a gap, and with a visibly frailer Jeremy Brett (significantly more pronounced in this episode, I would say, than in the previous one) we are left with the less well-known short stories from His Last Bow and the Case-Book; this episode is the first adaptation from the latter.

Yet I'd forgotten how good these later stories, written by Conan Doyle in the 1920s, could be. Here we have an ingenious whodunit which begins, on the face of it, with damning evidence of Miss Dunbar's guilt yet, through devilish clever plotting, has Holmes reveal a very different and ingenious truth- and the gold magnate Neil Gibson is a nuanced and not altogether pleasant figure. He may be rich and powerful, but he has an acknowledged history of domestic abuse; is Miss Dunbar truly so fortunate as Holmes and Watson assume?

This is a superbly made episode, with excellent guest performances from Daniel Massey and Catherine Russell. The setting of Miss Dunbar's cell as she awaits trial and potentially the gallows is suitably chilling- and this is, I believe, the first episode to feature a car. This series promises to be better than I perhaps expected.