Inspector Morse: The Last Enemy

 "Dr. Kerridge! We are trying to master the Veleta!"

Nearly a year and a half seem to have gone by since the last time I blogged Inspector Morse. I won't be blogging them that often, but I ought to be getting through the series at a faster pace than that. Ahsoka tomorrow, probably. 

Anyway, good episode as ever, again not from a novel but from an idea by Colin Dexter. This is almost the Platonic ideal of an Inspector Morse episode, I suppose. It's all about arrogant, ambitious Oxford academics sceming against each other while being well-read, rather snobbish and drinking spirits at all times of the day.

Ah, the 1980s. 1989 doesn't feel that long ago- I was twelve- but, as I've remarked before, we have desks without computers, people in the streets wearing suits in away that doesn't happen today, and Morse whingeing about the word processor beginning to challenge the almighty typewriter... while pining for a proper fountain pen with a bottle of ink. Everyone is "Mr", "Mrs" or "Miss", where first names would be used today. It was a long time ago, yet in many respects it wasn't.

There are some splendid turns from the guest cast, and both Kevin Whateley and Amanda Hillwood impress. Yet John Thaw once again excels as the complex man that is Morse, a man who is only slightly older than I am now...

Highlander (1986)

 "There can be only one!"

Everybody has really big films they haven't seen, even those of us who have blogged over five hundred. For me, Highlander was one of them until tonight, despite the fact that the '80s were the decade of my childhood.

It's extraordinarily good, of course; really well made with lavish production values but, far more importantly, a masterfully paced and structured script that takes a simple idea (superpowered immortals who duel for the "Prize") and executes it well in a more than usually thoughtful blockbuster. Oddly, it matters not that Lambert doesn't really shine as MacLeod; he's as good as he needs to be. He's outshined, of course, by genuine Scotsman Sean Connery who plays... a Spaniard, or an Egyptian, but certainly not a native of Caledonia. Yet Connery is perfect as Ramirez, Roxanne Clark is excellent as leading lady Brenda (still a young woman's name in 1986, apparently) and it's awesome to see Alan Police Squad North as a detective inspector, or whatever they're called in America.

There's some thoughtful meditation on what it must be like to be immortal, and see your loved ones age and die, but there's a deeper subtext to this that is perhaps not intended. Like Flash Gordon, this film is splendidly soundtracked by Queen, and the use of the song "Who Wants To Live Forever" these days evokes the AIDS pandemic of the time, especially as I saw this film in the wake of It's a Sin.

There is, I understand, much more fiction set in the intriguing world of this film. It is, however, satisfying as a whole. A superb '80s classic that I should have watched well before my forties.

Kenneth Williams: Fantabulosa

"What's the point? what's the bloody point?"

These BBC 4 dramas always were excellent telly but this 2006 masterpiece... well. You don't get much better telly than this. Michael Sheen is the king of truly inhabiting a real life figure, Tony Blair or not. And Kenneth Williams... he is one of the most fascinating personalities who ever lived. If only he'd, you know, gone forth and had sex with the men who would willingly have had him. this is a quietly effective damnation of the effect of mid-twentieth century homophobia, even on those who had the brains to know that the pre-1967 law was "barbaric". And the need for approval of a socially conservative public didn't help. Neither did what happened to Leiester's very own Joe Orton.

But the angst over his sexuality, his dying a horrifically repressed virgin at 62, is only the half of it. This working class intellectual always struggled with the conflict between his origins and his intellectual yearnings, a classic case of culture clash between two alien English cultures. Even his multiple voices and accents, so sublimely done by the outstanding Sheen, are as much about the codes and anxieties of class as they are about performance.

The real quotes from his diaries give us a true feel of the man’s inner life, so different from the well-known performer on the surface. And there is real tragedy, from the murder of Orton to the heavily hinted-at suicide of Williams’ father, shortly after a very casual rejection. Something like that would traumatise, however awkward the father-son relationship. All this is done with restrained writing; this is not script that draws attention to its own tricks and cleverness, but in its structure, choices and the voice it gives to Williams itself it is as much a triumph as Sheen’s magnificent performance itself.

A televisual triumph, then, and the finest hour of the late, lamented BBC 4 drama.