Inspector Morse: The Infernal Serpent

 "It's too warm for lentil soup.

SPOILERS. Be warned....

It's the '90ds now, or it has been for a few days, although, of course, this would have been filmed in 1989, and decades are an artificial thing, amnyway. Not much instantly changes when the year suddenly ends with a zero instead of a nine. This still feels very much the late '80s- a time of payphones, typewriters, nobody under 40 in a t-shirt, and environmentalist only having truly broken through a few years earlier.

And it feels a subtly different time. The open accent snobbery. The fact that environmentalism is not yet particularly about the climate emergency. And yet... the ending packs an enormous punch. Becauseyes, there's a bit of an environmental scandal. And a cover-up, all of which suddenly feels much modern. But throughout, amongst the Copley-Barnes family, there's the constant sense of some hidden secret, something very, very wrong.

The big reveal, at the end, is both effective and devastating. The attitudes to historic child sexual abuse are surprisingly modern, the message right. The Master is able to get away with his crimes because of his social status and Phil, a mere gardener, would never have been believed about his daughter.

Because of snobbery, of class prejudice. I suppose class snobbery always, in its power structures, colludes with paedophilia, which is certainly something to think on.

A superb, well-written bit of telly, this, with a brilliant pay-off. John Thaw, again, is superb in showing both Morse's moral indignation and how bloody difficult he can be. One of the finest episodes yet.

The Case-Book of Sherlock Holmes: The Disappearance of Lady Frances Carfax

 "I've failed".

Granada's Sherlock Holmes, after a couple of yars' absence, is back for the '90s, a new decade and a new title. It's interesting that we begin with an adaptation of a later short story, written in 1911, and one clearly set after the the turn of the century- Suffragettes are mentioned, and the Boer War has ended, so it can be no earlier than 1902. Holmes and Watson are middle-aged, and it is no longer obviouly trues that Jeremy Brett and Edward Hardwicke are really too old to play their characters, wh would both have been aroung fiftyish.

There's also a hint that Holmes' faculties may be declining with age; he solves the case- and prevents poor Lady Frances from being buried alive- soon enough to save her life but too late to prevent what appears to be severe PTSD. His sense of failure and guilt is very much played up by the direction and the excellent performance of a mildly frailer-looking Brett.

The filming in the Lake District is breathtaking, and the early scenes, with Watson on holiday writing to Holmes. Lady Frances' delightful eccentricity in these scenes is in horrible contrast to the tragedy that is to befall her- and Michael Jayston's superb performance as her aristocratic brother reminds us that, privileged though she may be, Lady Frances exists at the whims of men who control the purse strings.

The air of religiosity around the earlier scenes feels most odd in a Sherlock Holmes story but it is, of course, a clever piece of misdirection: it is the saintly missionary who turns out to be not only a confidence trickster but a murderer.

This is a strong opening, but possibly one that may herald an older and less confident Holmes?

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.