Inspector Morse: Deceived by Flight

 "You can't arrest a man because his wife won't sleep with him."

This is,perhaps, not as good an episode as some, and it feels for much of its length as though it's drifting somewhat aimlessly... but then, very late, we get the resolution, and it's all damnably clever, the clues all hidden in plain sight.

There's lots to enjoy here, even if we get the hoary old trope that the woman Morse fancies is inevitably the killer. Lewis gets to be good at cricket, and we get to learn Morse's old uni nickname of "Pagan", so-called because he wouldn't reveal his Christian name! I'm not sure that Lewis agreeing to use his leave to go undercover while the DIY was taken care of is at all realistic, but then Colin Dexter always did cheerfully refuse to do any research on police procedure.

There's an ugly look at how rampant homophobia was in 1989- and it was- but the script makrs very clear whose side it's on. Once more we get to see what a different world it was- the cars, the fashions, the technology- despite it being a time I very much remember. Sigh.

Zen philosophy is discussed, and of course E.M. Forster. But there's alsothe philosophy of cricket... and there, I suppose, I'm with Morse.

The Vault of Horror (1973)

 "No money in horror..."

I've seen lots of Amicus portmanteau horror films by now and enjoyed them all to a greater or lesser extent. This is easily the best of the lot.

Partly it's that this time around the tales are all splendidly gleeful in their ghoulish bad taste as the five men who enter the lift each receive their magnificently grand guignol comeuppance. A greedy murderer ends up having blood dispensed from his neck like wine from a wine box. An obsessively nagging husband who insists on neatness has his organs neatly displayed in jars after driving his wife to murder. An insurance fraudster is buried alive and meets his death. And so on, all amongst the most '70s clothing and interior decor that has ever been immortalised in film. 

It helps that Roy Ward Baker imbues the film with some visually witty touches, such as our insurance fraudster reading a novelisation of Tales from the Crypt, to which this is a semi-sequel. The script, too, is wittier and more gleeful this time round.

Yet what really makes this film shine, well-made as it is, is a superb cast full of the sort of well-known character actors who (Terry-Thomas aside) were not quite stars at the time. Standout performances from Glynis Johns and a splendidly vengeful, bizarrely bearded and deeply charismatic Tom Baker are a huge part of the film's success- and a success it is: I care not for the views po-faced contemporary critics.

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.