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THE ENDEAVOUR INTERVIEWS 2023: RUSSELL LEWIS PART III

Interview and introduction (‘Drinks at the Randolph’) copyright © Damian Michael Barcroft 2023

Drinks at the Randolph

THE MORSE BAR at the Randolph Hotel is quite small but comfortably intimate. This is particularly the case if you are fortunate enough to find an unoccupied table by the glorious, open stone fireplace which dominates the room. Although it may be tempting to simply glance across from your drink and bask in the warmly lit interior, admiring the classic elegance of the decor with its wood-panelled walls and some of the pleasingly familiar and really rather appropriate burgundy furnishings, it would be a crime not to look up occasionally to appreciate the arched ceiling with its ornate cornices and splendid chandeliers.

However, Colin Dexter could be forgiven for taking the Neo-Gothic grandeur of the hotel in his stride since the place must surely have felt like something of a second home to him, although, it is almost impossible to imagine that the author could resist becoming somewhat reflective during visits such as these given that so many of his books and their television adaptations include scenes which are set within those majestic walls. Of course, it would be pure speculation to suppose that Colin recalled that fanciful wet Saturday afternoon in 1972 while on holiday in a little guest house located somewhere between Caernarfon and Pwllheli, when he began writing the first of his thirteen novels and various short stories which introduced a certain ill-tempered detective with a fondness for real ale, opera and crosswords.

And, if Colin had in fact indulged in a little nostalgia regarding his life and achievements as an author, who could blame him? In addition to the aforementioned best-selling books, the many reprints and omnibus editions, there was, of course, also the phenomenal success of the television series, Inspector Morse, which ran for thirty-three episodes between 1987 and 2000. Indeed, even after all these years, the much-loved and admired show remains so potent in the minds of its millions of worldwide fans that guests may well find themselves overwhelmed by a great sense of melancholy as they look out of the window of the Morse Bar on to Beaumont Street and the Ashmolean Museum opposite, not to be able to see the great John Thaw drive past in that famous Mark 2 Jaguar.

Additionally, Lewis began in 2006, in which Morse’s faithful sergeant and loyal friend finally got both a promotion and his own TV show which was another huge hit with audiences and would run for the same amount of episodes as its predecessor until it ended in 2015. Furthermore, waiting patiently in the right-hand corner of the bar on a busy evening in September of 2010, Colin was about to witness yet another spin-off of sorts although it’s probably not the one you’re thinking of. At least not quite yet.

Alma Cullen had already written four episodes of the original Inspector Morse series when she received permission from Colin to write the first stage play based on his characters. House of Ghosts, a play-within-a-play, opens with a performance of Hamlet, in which the actress playing Ophelia suddenly dies mid-performance. Morse, played by Colin Baker – most famous as the sixth Doctor Who – is immediately at the scene of the crime having been in the audience and so begins the whodunnit. Colin Dexter was in town that evening to see the play at the New Theatre although there was also some other quite important business for him to attend to first.

Writer Russell Lewis – who protests that he never set out to major in crime despite the overwhelming evidence in his CV to the contrary – and Damien Timmer, joint managing director of the Mammoth Screen production company, had first worked together on one of the later Inspector Morse episodes, The Way Through the Woods, in 1995 with Russell adapting Colin’s novel of the same name and Damien acting as script editor. Damien also performed the same duties a couple of years later on the crime series, Heat of the Sun, which was written and co-created by Russell. Due to the difference in time zones as the production was shot in Zimbabwe, the two often found themselves – first at the Runnymede Hotel, on the banks of the River Thames, and later at Bray Studios, Windsor – working through or at least deep into the night. It was a fairly challenging and chaotic production and as close as one ever might wish to get to the “Heart of Darkness”. Despite “the horror”, Russell and Damien spent most of their time laughing like drains – or the madmen they had become.

Meanwhile, Michele Buck, who would later become the other co-founder of Mammoth Screen, was also working out of Bray and one day, in a little portakabin on the studio lot at about wine o’clock on a Friday afternoon, Damien introduced her to Russell and the three seem to have got on famously. While Damien and Michele would become a formidable duo in ITV, sweeping all before them – at Central, then United, and finally at ITV Studios, with a veritable litany of hit shows between them before launching the independent Mammoth Screen together, Russell became involved with the two once again on Lewis – writing the story for the first episode and returning to script later episodes – and that’s what led them to ask if he would be interested in writing this new project that Colin Dexter had been waiting ever so patiently to talk about at the Morse Bar.

Having travelled up by train from London Paddington, Michele and Russell, along with his development script editor, Tom Winchester who had also worked on Lewis, arrived at the Randolph Hotel around either five or six but certainly early evening. After shortly stopping to admire Colin’s Cracking Cryptic Crosswords guidebook which was proudly displayed in one of the glass cabinets by the reception desk, the four of them sat down and ordered champagne. Indeed, there was much to celebrate; Colin had read Russell’s script for what was originally referred to as Young Morse – a prequel to Inspector Morse that would celebrate twenty-five years since the broadcast of the first Morse episode, The Dead of Jericho – and Colin gave his blessing there and then.

Shortly afterwards, walking only a few minutes away from the hotel to the New Theatre, Colin, Michele, Tom and Russell, met with Christopher Burt (producer of Inspector Morse, Lewis and so many other iconic British television shows) and that other Lewis, Kevin Whatley. Finding their seats and waiting for the performance of House of Ghosts to begin, as the lights went down, this was perhaps the first opportunity for Russell to take a moment and reflect that Endeavour was actually going to happen; Inspector Morse would be properly celebrated for its Silver Anniversary in 2012. A few years later in my first interview with him, Russell recalled the events of that evening with great deference:

‘Funny – I haven’t thought about that day a great deal since, but it was life-changing in its way. When you’re at the coalface every thought is about the production, and you have some pretty torrid times one way and another. It’s ridiculously easy under Wartime Conditions to forget how fortunate one is. Not to take it for granted, but sometimes only to see the problems you’ve got to solve. And then you go – wait a minute, this really is as good as it gets. We’ve got this amazing sandbox, brilliant collaborators, and you get to spend the best part of each year actually telling new stories about Colin’s beloved character.

Endeavour, Fred Thursday and the rest of Oxford’s Finest really seem to have connected with the audience – which is lovely. They invite us into their homes, both here and around the world. From the City of Dreaming Spires to the world – the reach of thing is staggering. And all of this is happening because of that evening at the Randolph Hotel when Colin gave us his blessing and entrusted us with his creation.’

And so, that is how it all began. Sadly, however, after 10 years of conducting well over 60 interviews with the cast and crew of Endeavour, I must now address how it will end and so I somewhat solemnly present my final online exclusive Q&A with Russell Lewis; bespoke writer, purveyor of fine manuscripts, and, truly, the best and wisest of men.

~

‘Beethoven had his Schindler. Haydn his Griesinger. Every artist needs his biographer. Someone to bear witness to his greatness and set it down for posterity…’

– Dr. Daniel Cronyn, FUGUE (S1:E2)

‘Hold on tightly, let go lightly.’

~ The final exclusive Endeavour interview with Russell Lewis ~

‘All right, yes, please, and thank you. All aboard for the last bus.’

-TERMINUS (S8:E3)

DAMIAN: Considering the title of the last film of the previous series, TERMINUS, as in the end of a journey, the fact that the featured bus route was number 33 which referenced not only that this was the thirty-third Endeavour film but also both Inspector Morse and Lewis ended with the same amount of episodes, plus, Sam Thursday’s senior officer, Stanhope, shared the same name with the character in the war play, Journey’s End, wasn’t it all a little mischievous and misleading?

RUSS: Perish the thought. I mean – we try desperately hard to keep our cards close to our chest in order not to spoil things for the audience. The expectation was that we would follow the lead of Inspector Morse and Lewis and call time at 33 films. But none of us on Endeavour have ever mentioned how many we might make. For years, as you know, we lived – like most shows – from commission to commission, never knowing if we would be renewed. So – there was often a kind of a ‘could end there’ note to the final film of every series. But, as I’ve said elsewhere, if we’d ended things at 33 films –then,  taken together with the previous series – it would have meant Colin Dexter losing his wicket on 99 runs. I sort of felt honour bound to see the great man back to the pavilion a centurion before bad light stopped play. And, perhaps, given the interconnectedness of the overarching story behind these last three cases, folk might view them as one thing. So.

But we couldn’t ignore people’s expectations – that this could very well be the end – hence the nods to the magic number.

DAMIAN: We mentioned Agatha Christie recently and you said that Shaun and Roger weren’t too keen on some of the tropes associated with the genre but wasn’t TERMINUS overtly Christie-esque?

RUSS: Not originally. In its first iteration, it was a straightforward slasher. The request to make it a more traditional whodunit arose from the reaction to the first draft. Sort of, ‘Nobody goes full Carpenter.’ I’ve always been taken by the device of the ‘final girl’ – and I was looking to invert that. So that was the initial jumping off point. And it sort of follows on from your previous question. I wanted to mark that 33 in some way – and as soon as I struck on it being the number of a bus, the question then becomes how do I get from that to that impossible conceit ‘the isolated community’ – whether that’s Soldier Island or Camp Crystal – how do you go about creating an isolated community in 1971 in Oxfordshire – and that leads to you to snow, and the ‘country house murder mystery’ is never far away – but of course whenever you think of snow – you inevitably think of a particularly romantic and glamorous train stuck in a snowdrift – and so it became Murder on the Luxton & District Express.

DAMIAN: To what extent did the Fontana editions of the Christie books with Tom Adams’ covers inspire the imagery for TERMINUS and last week’s film, UNIFORM?

RUSS: I don’t know about TERMINUS so much, but certainly UNIFORM. My opportunities to do such things were growing increasingly few. So… But he’s always been there. Those images. They’re sort of fetish status for me and Damien Timmer. We both adore them. Incredible things.

Some of the covers that fired and furnished young Russ’ imagination (see previous interview)

DAMIAN: The reveal that Endeavour was the drunk on the bus and the witness they’d been looking for all along was absolute genius. I don’t know if there’s a name for this kind of device where a mysterious character is hidden in plain sight, but it reminded me slightly of the identity twists of Norman Bates’ mother in Psycho, Kevin Spacey’s characters in both The Usual Suspects and Seven, and the reveal that it was young Michael Myers we see in the POV shots at the beginning of Halloween that murdered his sister.

RUSS: Well – that’s lovely to hear that it worked for you. I was worried that it might be glaringly obvious. But there we are. Phew! It would have been a problem if people had tumbled to it.

DAMIAN: And speaking of Halloween and the ‘final girl’, I know Strange and Joan won tickets to see The Carpenters in concert (STRIKER, S8:E1) but I’m wondering if it might have been more appropriate for them to see John Carpenter! Not only do we have a masked killer on the loose in this film (one of them also had the surname of Loomis), there’s also the reference to Haddonfield and am I right in thinking that Matt’s score – particularly during the snow scenes – had echoes of Ennio Morricone’s soundtrack to The Thing?

RUSS: Well, one might as well be hung for a sheep as a lamb. Oh – I wouldn’t put anything past Matt Slater. But yes, you’re right, of course. As soon as you get to the hotel, things go full Cat & Canary/And Then There Were None – Harry Alan Towers second stab at And Then There Were None is set in a ski lodge, so there are nods to that, and, of course – as you rightly identified – man being the warmest place to hide. I could have happily made it a two-part story with fully one half set at the hotel. But sometimes less is more. There’s also a touch of The Cask of Amontillado going on – returning to the Rackham [Edgar Allan Poe] illustration we talked about previously.

DAMIAN: Let’s take a look at the following scene which I very much liked:

INT. THURSDAY’S HOUSE. HALL – NIGHT 3 – 0029

THURSDAY seeing DOROTHEA out… 

THURSDAY: Thanks for coming.

DOROTHEA: I’m not sure I’ve been any help at all. You want to get to the bottom of this – there’s only one person left alive knows what truly happened at Tafferton Park. And that’s Flavian Creech. Goodnight.

DOROTHEA exits.  A moment on THURSDAY — he reaches for his HAT and COAT. WIN comes into the HALL. 

THURSDAY: There’s a patient I’ve got to see at Strangmoor Hospital. It’s urgent.

WIN: Who’s this for? Morse?

(off THURSDAY)

It’s Sam you should be out there looking for. That’s who you should ‘have to’. Your own. Our son. My son. Not somebody else’s. Why aren’t you over there? I’ll tell you why. Because you’re a coward. If anything’s happened to him…  

JOAN: Mum, don’t say that.

WIN: You keep out of it! I’ll say what I please in my own house and I’ll thank you to not take sides! I’m not one of your women at your place you can talk down to. You think you know it all with your books and your courses and your ideas. And where did that get you? Leamington!

JOAN – stabbed to the heart.

JOAN: Don’t. Please…

THURSDAY: What does that mean?

WIN: Never you mind what it means.  You think cause I keep my mouth shut I walk around with my eyes closed?  Well, I don’t.  You weren’t so bloody clever there, were you? 

JOAN: No.

WIN: No! I know more about life than you ever will and don’t you forget it.  I’m your mother, and you’ll give me the respect I’m due.

(to THURSDAY)

Well, go if you’re going, then. And if you are going don’t come back. I’m sick of the sight of you.

And with that WIN heads off.

JOAN: Dad. She doesn’t mean it. It’s just…

THURSDAY: No. She does. And she’s right. Doing nothing. Bearing it. That takes a different kind of guts. I’m no good at sitting waiting. Never have been. If I could do something to help find Sam…  

JOAN: Of course, you would. She knows that. We all know that. She’s… 

THURSDAY: I’d tear the world down to see him home safe. Give my last breath. But I can’t. There’s nothing I can do. Nothing. And that’s… 

THURSDAY can’t find the words to express the existential horror contained in his powerlessness.

THURSDAY: If I can’t fix the one thing – then I’ve got to fix the other. You know how I am. Sam’s always taken after your Mum. Slow to anger and quick to forgive. But you and me? We’re… 

JOAN: I know.

THURSDAY nods. Something understood. Unspoken between father and daughter. Mutual absolution. THURSDAY dons his HAT and COAT, exits into night and snowfall. JOAN stares at the shut door – heart breaking.

CUT TO:

DAMIAN: Electrifying scene. Now, although I completely understand that Win is absolutely desperate and distraught about her son going missing, like previous misfortunes such as Thursday losing all the money he lent to his brother, isn’t she still rather cruel to both her husband and her daughter – perhaps particularly the latter?

RUSS: I think everyone’s got a breaking point.

DAMIAN: Was Win’s unkind reference to Joan’s ‘books’, ‘courses’, her ‘clever ideas’ and asking where they got her, supposed to echo the comments made by Endeavour’s mother-in-law and her sarcastic denunciation of his failure despite his ‘books and poetry’ and his ‘snooty music’ in the previous film?

RUSS: From the other end of the telescope. Any parent/child relationship – mother/daughter relationship can be… challenging. I think that’s been the thing about the Thursdays – under the magnolia painted wood-chip there have always been these massive emotional tectonic plates at work. Things not spoken about.

DAMIAN: And are the audience to assume that Thursday and Joan have never talked about the events in Leamington, including her miscarriage?

RUSS: I suspect that Thursday père had no idea that she’d even been in hospital. Win – if we imagine she knew, and I suppose we must from what she says – would have kept it from Fred. For a number of reasons. Primarily – and quite practically – so that he didn’t go around and break every bone in Joan’s fancy man’s body. Joan too – in her scene with Endeavour all those years ago, insisting her injuries were the result of ‘a fall’. In that wonderful episode title from the matchless DeadwoodA Lie Agreed Upon. That would have been her tack with Fred, had it been ever divulged. Whereas Endeavour could restrain his fury, there would have been no stopping Fred. The thing about it is – she’s selling this story about ‘a fall’ to coppers who probably weekly if not daily have in their line of work dealt with black-eyed wives and sweethearts with a propensity for walking into doors or falling down stairs.

I saw a bit of that as a boy. The aftermath at least. Not within the family – in this particular instance – but adjacent. I mean – there had been terrible and long sustained physical abuse visited on my grandmother during her first marriage in the 20s, but this was much later. The story – oddly enough – came to the fore in QUARTET. Domestic violence. We would go and visit the wife often during her regular stays in hospital. She’d have been possibly in her sixties. Given – perhaps understandably – to drink. ‘Nothing of her’ as the phrase has it. Maybe seven stone wringing wet.  I can see her now on her gurney – battered from head to foot. She looked as if she’d been in a serious car crash. Funnily enough, I’m probably more shocked looking back on it now, than I was as a boy. I can’t remember exactly how old I was – not small. Ten. Twelve. Something like that.

The husband had a prosthetic leg – I’m not sure if it was a war injury. To annoy him, or get back at him in some way – his wife would hide the prosthesis. When he found it, it would become the instrument of his violence, which is likely why his wife hid the damned thing in the first place. A quite truly awful cycle of violence. Both are long gone now, getting on for half a century. I think – probably unsurprisingly – she went first, then him some years later. The thing was everybody knew. Everybody knew. And nothing was done. Succour was lent and comfort where it was needed but there was no intervention. No police. People still patronised the business. And you’d stand on your side of the counter, and you knew – and he knew you knew – and you knew he knew you knew. And not a word was said beyond, ‘And a quarter of sherbert lemons, please.’

So – the notion that Joan might ‘have a fall’ – that was something familiar. That eyes would be averted, and if at all possible it wouldn’t be spoken of again – that too was something I knew a bit about. I think also as a mother – Win’s protecting her daughter. Protecting Joan in Fred’s eyes. Her ‘reputation’ – quote unquote. Allowing him to still think of her as she imagines he might think of her. Still ‘his little girl’ – again, quote unquote. The thought that he had somehow failed to protect her – as he would think of it – would have very likely broken him.  Win wants to somehow contain the hurt, and absorb as much of it as she can for both of them.  It tends to be what Win has always done.  She’s protecting them both.  But there’s only so much of other people’s pain one can deflect and take inside oneself before the mind and soul becomes overloaded – and Sam being missing…  She has to off-load some section of this psychic and emotional baggage she’s towing.

DAMIAN: As you wrote this scene, did you know that Jack Bannon would reprise his role as Sam Thursday and might his fate have been very different otherwise?

RUSS: We didn’t know if Jack would very graciously return. In early iterations, we assumed that he very likely wouldn’t, and the ending reflected that. Someone asked me the other day about the final film and multiple alternative endings designed to throw people off the scent. Well – there certainly were a couple of scripted endings for TERMINUS. But I think, in the end, we went with the one that you saw. But there was the potential for a much more cataclysmic ending – which we stepped back from quite late.

DAMIAN: We’ve frequently talked about art imitating life or coincidences as you call them. However, a little canary told me that Roger Allam had an Uncle Fred who fought in World War II and an Aunt Win! I like coincidence as much as the next man, but seriously?

RUSS: Yes – you couldn’t make it up, could you. I’d no idea when I named Win Win.  

DAMIAN: Hmmm. Anyway, let’s take a look at another great scene:

INT. THURSDAY’S HOUSE. HALL/LIVING ROOM – NIGHT 3 – 0403

JOAN: opens the door to STRANGE.

JOAN: Jim?

STRANGE: I did try to get you on the blower, but the lines must be down. I went by Morse’s but the place is in darkness and he’s not answering the door. So. But I wouldn’t fret. He usually lands butter side up. 

(he smiles)

So – how’s everyone? And more to the point – how are you?

That’s all it takes. One kind word. While breathes Jim Strange, the age of chivalry is not yet passed. But kindness is more than she can bear…

JOAN: I’m sorry, I just…

JOAN covers her face and breaks down. 

LIVING ROOM – WIN drawn by the sound of her daughter’s sobbing, comes to the door and looks along the HALL to see by the FRONT DOOR, JOAN buried in STRANGE’s comforting embrace as he rocks and shushes her. Both oblivious to WIN’s presence.

STRANGE: Hey! Hey, now. I got you. It’s alright. I got you. Don’t worry. There now. There, there. It’ll all be alright. I’ve got you.

And he has.

CUT TO:

DAMIAN: Strange has got her. What was Win thinking at that moment?

RUSS: I think there was little room in Win’s head for anything other than worrying about Sam. But maybe in some corner of her it registered as potentially something more than first appeared. There’s a line in John Whiting’s The Devils – the play based on Huxley’s The Devils of Loudon, later made into a remarkable movie by Ken Russell – where Grandier is talking about how he and his mistress Ninon came to be lovers. He had first come to her house to offer comfort after the death of her husband – a rich wine merchant. And he says, ‘Tears must be wiped away. How is that to be done without a caress?’

So – I kind of had that in mind. Not that anyone in their right mind would compare Strange with Urbain Grandier – but the sentiment.

DAMIAN: Can you tell me about writing the scenes at Strangmoor Psychiatric Hospital and the kind of actor you envisioned in your mind as you wrote the character of Flavian Creech and why you referenced “The Beast of Belgravia” since it was the moniker of a real-life murderer?

RUSS: Flavian Creech was a late addition, if I remember. Such was his history that it felt like he warranted a notorious sobriquet – ‘Beast of’ felt the right kind of period hyperbole, and I just landed on Belgravia at random – having cat-sat there for some months many decades ago in a flat belonging to a 1940s Hollywood starlet. I’ve just remembered that she once appeared as a guest in Morse. How mad is that? Only connect.

So – it’s just happenstance, I’m afraid. Had a real Beast of Belgravia been in my databank or on my radar I would have avoided using it. There must be between five and six-hundred names one’s either made up or snatched from the ether across the last ten years. It would be nigh on miraculous if art didn’t entirely coincidentally imitate life at some point.

Usually, compliance and neg-checking would flag such an instance – but given the sheer volume of such checks it becomes almost impossible to identify or pick-up every connection. The only thing you can rely on is that if one were aware of it, then we’d have avoided it like the plague. The last thing one ever wants to do is discomfit anyone or cause them a moment’s pain – least of all anyone with a connection to a crime in real life. Relatives or loved ones or children of the deceased – God forbid – whomever it might be.

If what one had held to be invention caused anyone the slightest upset, then I apologise wholeheartedly and unreservedly. We might take the odd pot-shot at targets inspired by real life counterparts – for example, some of the less savoury political groups that have troubled public life in these islands – but none of us would ever knowingly take aim at people who might’ve suffered or been connected to some terrible real world event. That’s not what we’re about at all. It’s a whodunit. A bit of entertainment on the television.   

DAMIAN: Of course. Anyway, just out of curiosity, who was the 1940s Hollywood starlet?

RUSS: Her name was Mildred Shay, and I believe – due to her diminutive stature – she was known in her pomp as ‘The Pocket Venus.’ She appeared, if memory serves, as one of the American tourists in The Wolvercote Tongue.

DAMIAN: Well, fan my brow! Central to solving the case is the clue about the cufflinks which marked each man out as a member of the football Pools syndicate and predicting the results. While we were discussing STRIKER (S8:E1) and football recently, you made the mistake of mentioning to me that it was a Holy ritual in your household on Saturday evenings for your old man to mark off his Pools coupon so I’m likely to read too much into it… However, if this idea wasn’t inspired by your childhood, then it must have at least brought back some very vivid memories?

RUSS: At one point, a Pools win for the Thursdays crossed my mind – but it would have been too cute. So. In all honesty, those memories are never very far away. So long as there’s football, it’ll always bring to mind ‘The Results’ and the particular vocal cadence and inflection with which they were announced. It’ll be something lost to those who never knew it, but for about ten minutes every Saturday evening vast swathes of the country stopped what they were doing to mark off their Pools. The announcer would read through the entirety of the full time results from every match in the English and Scots football divisions. Heads would be bent over coupons, pens poised, and by the way the first result was intoned, you could take a pretty reliable stab at whether what followed would be revealed as a win, a draw, or a loss. There’d be an upward inflection on the name of the Away Team – a note of surprise – if it was going to be a win. For draws, both teams names would be delivered with the same cadence. I don’t know if you can find old examples of this on Youtube, but if they are there, then they’ll bear me out.

DAMIAN: Of all the people from your childhood, who do you think would be most proud of your remarkable accomplishments as a writer?

RUSS: Most proud? I genuinely couldn’t hazard a guess. Having written anything at all that might ever have been made would have seemed so unlikely to all the family. But I was a bookish boy who ruined his eyesight reading by torchlight under the bedclothes and, when I wasn’t up the local library, spent his summer holidays filling exercise books with ‘stories’. So. Perhaps it wasn’t wholly unexpected that ‘words’ would be involved somehow. They’d all be proud, I’m sure. Not that I was writing particularly – but that I was making a living. That’s what it was all about – that generation, that class. Dependable gainful employment. The means to keep a roof over one’s head and put food on the table. I suppose, like anyone, I can say that I wouldn’t be doing what I do now if the cards hadn’t fallen in the particular order that they did. And they were all a huge part of that. Each in their way. In the deathless phrase beloved of the Sunday papers Problem Page confessional – ‘one thing led to another.’ Fate. For want of a nail…

You don’t get it at the time. Not completely. But now – from the other end of the telescope… It would have been nice to have more time with them. To have known them better as an adult.

DAMIAN: When was the first time you heard someone say, ‘Mind how you go’?

RUSS: I honestly don’t recall. It’s just one of those phrases, isn’t it, that’s always been in my Jamboree Bag of British period idiom. I’m inordinately fond of those phrases.  Something comforting about them. I suppose it’s because they remind me of where I started. It’s about class and place. ‘How’s your Bert’s lumbago?’ Such things – “Mustn’t grumble!” – serve as a sort of verbal social lubricant. When it comes to emotion, we’re not known in these damp islands to be a madly demonstrative race, but I think those nuts and bolts, seemingly inane phrases can be freighted with so much. A man such as Fred Thursday would find it infinitely easier to say ‘Mind how you go’ than ‘I love you.’  I’m not sure he’d even think that his various friendships with his colleagues fall under that category. You love your wife. Your children. But men? So – sometimes ‘Mind how you go’ will mean exactly that. And sometimes it’s a way of saying, ‘You matter to me. I care deeply about you.’ He talked recently about his men – losing three of them quite close to the end of the war. I think the feeling there between people who have stood that close to death for a long time with others – that fellow feeling, that’s love, isn’t it?  Though it’s – then at least – only deemed safe to describe as such from the other side of the veil. ‘Greater love hath no man…’

DAMIAN: The official ITV press announcement stated that the production company, Mammoth Screen, together with Shaun, Roger and yourself, had all mutually agreed that this would be the last series. Was there any doubt in your mind as to whether this was the right decision for you, the cast and crew, and also a devoted and loyal audience?

RUSS: The writing had been on the wall for some time. Along with a substantial quantity of blood. And deBryn’s beloved brain-matter. So. I could have carried on writing it quite happily until I fell off the perch – but sometimes you have to look to Kenny Rogers for a lead. It was the right time to stop. The difficulty of making a thing increases in direct proportion to its longevity. And most important of all, we didn’t want to outwear our welcome.

DAMIAN: I think it was in our very first interview that you told me you knew exactly how Endeavour would end. Has your original vision finally made it to the screen intact?

RUSS: No plan survives first contact with the enemy. But certainly some part of it made it through – after a fashion. The part that mattered. If not always a love story, it was always a story about love. Of one kind or another. Which sort of touches on your earlier question about ‘Mind how you go.’

DAMIAN: Given your writing has gained both the love of the audience and the respect of your peers, to what extent did you feel any pressure to deliver one final script that wouldn’t disappoint?

RUSS: Well – both statements probably wouldn’t stand deep interrogation, but it’s very kind of you to say and think so. Er… the main body of your question. I don’t think any of us wanted to let down an audience that’s been with us for over ten years, and beyond that, none of us wanted to do any kind of damage to the affection in which Colin’s creation is rightly held. So. No pressure. 

In all honesty, writing the yearly series finale is typically done under pretty heavy manners. You’re up against it for time, for budget, for… a multiplicity of reasons. You simply don’t have the luxury of time to allow yourself to be caught like a rabbit in the headlights. If that makes sense. It’s got to get done – so, as often as not, whatever extraneous meaning might be imparted to the thing by dint of its being ‘the last’ whatever passes one by entirely. You’re just grateful to have survived with your skin and neck more or less intact. 

You just do your best and hope that’s enough.

Of course, the curse is that one’s fated only to be aware of the things one could have done better. Or the things that for one reason or another couldn’t be delivered or realised just so – despite everyone’s best efforts. And they can and do come prowling at three a.m. – that’s if you’ve managed to get to sleep at all. It’s all you can see. But that’s the price of entry. Living with one’s manifold shortcomings. Dwell on it, and it’s a one way ticket to the laughing house. 

DAMIAN: One actor I interviewed recently said that they not only loved the script for the final episode, but it also made them cry. Can you describe your emotions as you wrote the words, ‘Roll end credits’ for the very last time?

RUSS: It would have been against an unforgiving minute, so very likely the feeling would have been one of relief. But it’s really not like Paul Sheldon typing THE END, then having his one cigarette and a glass of champagne. More’s the pity. It may be like that in publishing, but in television it really is never over until it’s locked. And truly not even then. There will be pink pages, and blue pages, and green pages, and salmon pages and goldenrod pages, and ADR… So – it’s a staggered ending that sputters to a close. You never know the point where no more will be required, so it sort of ends without you knowing the exact moment that your input has become surplus to requirements. 

I’d love to say it was a wonderful moment of fulfilment, but it was probably a much more prosaic, ‘Can I sleep now?’

DAMIAN: I know you mentioned last time that you weren’t downhearted about Endeavour coming to an end but in years to come, should you hear the Morse theme playing on the wireless, or see a burgundy or black Jaguar driving past, will you not feel sentimental or nostalgic?

RUSS: The glass is always half-full for you, Barcroft. Like Rumpole, I’ve operated on a taxi rank principle for over thirty-odd years. A hansom for hire. Or hack – depending on your point of view. So, I expect it’ll be more a feeling of, ‘I had that Morse in the back of the cab once…’

As I said previously, I’ll very likely never have a sandbox like it again. So that I’ll miss.  Working with that fantastic team of creative people. That’s the most difficult aspect of it all.  

DAMIAN: Even though you will never commit them to paper again, do you still hear the voices of Endeavour and all the other regular characters and, if so, what do they say?

RUSS: “Well, Clarice? Have the lambs stopped screaming?”  

I think I mentioned elsewhere about Stan Laurel continuing to write Laurel and Hardy material after Babe died, and that the pages were found in his desk drawer after he died. Whether that’s apocryphal or not, I don’t honestly know, but the impulse will remain, I’m sure. That particular Endeavour muscle. You don’t spend time with those characters for more than a decade and then imagine they’ll fully vacate the premises at the end of it. So – I expect they’ll be unquiet spirits who’ll haunt my heart for some time to come yet. Benevolent ones, hopefully.  

At risk of going full Norma Desmond…  I’ll miss the real people involved more than I can say. For many years we held our read-throughs at 141 Cleveland Street, Fitzrovia, an address that bears a blue plaque on the wall outside which commemorates another Morse – Samuel – the painter and inventor of the Code. Another one of those mad coincidences, but that’s by the by. Some writers may like read-throughs. I’ve always found them agony. Your heart sings a bit if a gag goes over well in the room, but mostly you’re just standing on a tightrope of insecurity over a vat of hungry crocodiles. And after the read, come the notes, and the tender evisceration and dismemberment of the draft. But…  and it’s a fairly colossal but – the atmosphere on those bright blue mornings…  The deep breath before the plunge. Team Endeavour Assemble! The joy and disbelief that comes with the recurrent realisation that one gets to do this for a job.

Those mornings, you hear it before you see it. Andy Foster – our Second AD for many years – was typically on the street, clocking and logging the arrivals. Then, as you climb the stairs, you just hear this murmuration. Seventy, eighty-odd people having conversations. And Wardrobe/Costume are running through outfits with guests. And Design have boards to show and tell. There’s hugs and hale fellow well met, and laughter. So much laughter. And by some demented twist of good fortune you have found yourself a part of this.

The monumental privilege of it.  My God.

And then the second hand sweeps round to ten o’clock and the room falls silent, and all the nonsense and the anxiety and the turmoil and the fussing and fighting just falls away, and we’re all pulling together in service of something hopefully greater than ourselves.

The pandemic put an end to that – as it put an end to so much else of far greater weight. So we never got a ‘last read’ – or rather we did, but didn’t realise it was the final time we were ever to be all gathered together in one room.

But Base remained – the dynamic of being at Production Base on a studio day.   Everyone with their part to play. Electric mayhem and marshalled chaos. Those ‘whispered conversations in overcrowded hallways’. The silence on the floor as you creep around in the shadows off camera. ‘Video Village’ – where Wardrobe/Costume and Hair and Make-Up foregather to watch the world’s tiniest monitors. The skill and craft that everyone – cast and crew – brings to the party.

Design. Sound. Lights. Props. Chippies. Sparks. Camera. Unit drivers. Catering. Runners with the thankless – and often far worse – task of ‘locking off’ roads on location – so that a modern car or pedestrian doesn’t go pootling through the back of a period shot. Our editors. The incredible work done in the post-houses. From each according to their gifts.

All of it marshalled film by film by our directors, and series by series by our producers who artfully wrangled the thing into being – Dan McCulloch; Camille Gatin; Tom Mullens; Helen Ziegler; John Phillips and Neil Duncan who went Cox and Box on Series 5; Deanne Cunningham on Series 6; Jim Levison across 7 & 8 with C. Webber Co-Pro, and finally, Charlotte Webb producing and Joe Shrubb coming in as Co-Pro on this last run of films. Got that? There will be a written paper. They have been aided and abetted across these nine series by Line Producers – the unsinkable Helga Dowie and, I think since late Series 5 or early Series 6 the unflappable Matthew Hamilton with one time First Ad Nick Brown doing a trio and Carolyn Parry-Jones running a quick single – while Betsan Morris Evans knocked one to the boundary as Post Production Producer in 2014.

I’m mindful of so many thanks that I’d like to make, but I fear it would test the patience of your readership past breaking. But I can’t let the moment pass without thanking my Script Editors – who have saved my bacon and show the show more times than you could possibly imagine. In batting order – on OVERTURE – wonderful Tom Winchester; then, the great Sam Costin who set an impossibly high benchmark, and kept me sane and alive through Series 1-3. Best beloved Drama Queen Amy Thurgood who came in to bat across Series 4-and an epically long Series 5. Lovely Paul Tester – who had the briefest tenure proper of all my companions on Series 6. Then my own sospan bach Charlotte Webber on Series 7 and sort of Series 8, though she ducked out half-way through FILM 2 to AP, when Uju Enendu stepped bravely into the breach. And then on this final run – having ascended to the Purple – Charlotte kind of wore two hats. And wore them effortlessly.

I think I said to you previously that I’ll likely never have another sandbox like this to play in again. I can’t think of anywhere else I could have done half the things we’ve attempted in Endeavour. And credit for the lion’s share of that belongs to the Mammoths. Principally, the Skipper – Drama Head Cook and Bottle-Washer Damien Timmer, has been incredibly supportive of my madnesses. Michele Buck who made so much of it happen across the early days. Rebecca Keane – and her wonderful story mind. Tom Mullens during his tenure first as producer and then as Exec.. And most recently Helen Ziegler who may just be made entirely of sunshine. Jon Williams and James Penny taking care of the Grown-Up Stuff – logistic and legal – that really never gets enough credit, but without which…

There’s one more thing without which Endeavour would never have been Endeavour, nor Morse Morse, nor Lewis Lewis – and that is the breathtaking music, a flawless blend of perfectly curated major and minor classical and operatic pieces and original scores – now over a hundred of them – a labour of love and supreme artistry originated and sustained over the best part of thirty years by Barrington Pheloung before – with his untimely passing – the world of music lost one of its brightest and most beloved sons, at which point composing duties on Endeavour were taken up seamlessly by Matthew Slater whose scores have built on and enriched that extraordinary legacy while adding to its lustre with something that has become uniquely his. For my part, I’ve had the joy of providing him with lyrics for pieces ranging from the sublime – our Venetian opera, translated into ‘old Italian’ by Nico Rosetti – to the ridiculous – a jingle to promote road safety, ‘If the Pelican Can Then So Can You!’  Surely amongst Mister Bright’s finest hours.

And then you come to the sharp end. An incredible cast assembled by Casting Director Susie Parriss that any writer would be blessed to write for. Jimmy Bradshaw brought Max’s tender humanity to life and matched it with his own, leavening even the darkest moments with good humour, restoring dignity to the dead, and bringing comfort to the living in even the most tragic of circumstances. It’s never easy to inhabit a heritage role, but such is Jimmy’s talent that he has made Endeavour’s Max all his own, while leaving any happy remembrances by the audience of Morse’s Max not only untroubled, but inarguably enhanced.

Riggers had me at ‘Hello, matey!’ – effortlessly filling those estimable boots and being always the one man you wanted to see coming round the corner in a pinch. Straight out of Drama College and straight into blue serge at Cowley nick. Sean Rigby was Jim Strange from the moment he first appeared on the casting tape in his three piece suit.  And what a fine, fine, infinitely subtle performance he’s given. Burnishing a heritage character with an additional depth and nuance that can only enrich any enjoyment of his later incarnation.

It’s impossible to imagine Bright’s journey from borderline martinet to this quietly heroic, decent man with such a soundless depth to his soul being credible in the hands of anyone but Anton Lesser. Who knew? Not me. But sometimes you see something in a performance and it makes you recalibrate your plans. I think with Anton and Bright it was there early on – and it’s his marriage and the tragedy of Dulcie, the lost child. With regard to the former circumstance, it would have been very easy to laugh at the veiled hints of his apparent cuckolding – I think in SWAY it came to the fore, though there may have been earlier nods – but Anton’s choices, ever wise, about how to deliver that material turned it into something utterly heart-breaking. I suppose it’s with PREY – after the events of NEVERLAND for which he blamed himself desperately – that one starts to see the change, which reaches its apotheosis in DEGUELLO. A man with a big hat, and an even bigger heart. Vivat Reginald! Vivat Lesser!

As to the Editrix of the Oxford Mail? There something of Ariel, that tricksy spirit, about Dorothea Frazil – a mysterious, playful quality which Abigail Thaw brought to the role right from that very first scene. Part Jiminy Cricket, part Puck, part Passepartout, with just a pinch of Cheshire Cat, but forever Endeavour’s lucky penny — turning up when least expected to lend wisdom or comfort, counsel or encouragement – often all those things at once. Our guardian angels don’t always announce themselves. It’s been a delight to write for her — as it was to write for her Dad. Beyond an abundance of talent, class and sheer presence, they share a disinclination to offer Notes on the text, a particular and admirable family trait that commends itself enormously to writers.  

Which brings me to the Thursdays. A pinch of Larkins, a touch of the Huggetts, and a gigantic slice of Coward – in inspiration at least. I suppose Private Lives and Blithe Spirit and all the witty repartee and amusing songs across the Long Weekend are how people think of him now – if they think of him at all – but The Master wrote those profoundly moving evocations of people and their lives at the other end of the social scale, which – after all – was where Coward had come from himself. I’m thinking of Bernard Miles and John Mills characters’ families in In Which We Serve, and of course the Sunday afternoon telly wonder of This Happy Breed. Celia Johnson – Dame Celia Johnson – gracing both and, of course – Brief Encounter which has been such a touchstone for Endeavour. The delivery of her speech about the Torrin – her husband’s ship — in In Which We Serve just about steals the picture out from under everyone else. Not a dry eye. So – I guess that’s where the Thursdays sprang from. Those worlds – or the last echo of the same in which one grew up in the 1960s. Those values. That decency. London Pride.

It was so lovely to have Jack Bannon back for this final run of stories. As the eponymous star of Pennyworth with such enormous demands on his time and talent it was terribly gracious and generous of him to return to Casa Thursday when he could so easily have left us twisting in the wind. A mark of the man. It’s only now just struck me how his line about how small the Thursday house seems to the returning Sam must have been a little bit the same for Jack. I’m just so touched that he came home one last time.

As for Miss Thursday – where to begin. Youth, and optimism, and courage and hope.  She was the changing times. At least my own doubtless ham-fisted and ham-splained man-splained albeit sincere attempt to have one young woman’s emotional and political evolution across the period embody a generational desire for change. Inside a whodunit show. Fools rush in… Happily, Sara Vickers’ pitch perfect, flawlessly judged performance saved my blushes, and I shall be forever grateful.

I touched on Win Thursday earlier – but whatever my subtextual intentions, which I’ve gone into at length, it’s Caroline O’Neill who has intuitively winnowed that out from dialogue and stage directions which are oftimes gnomic to say the least. But Caro has an incredible feel for identifying and expressing exactly what I’m saying with Win through what I’m not saying. Such is her skill and sensitivity, her craft and art. She also makes a mean pot of Jam.

Then there’s the man in the other hat. Neither white nor black – but usually some shade of grey. Roger Allam’s Fred Thursday – the unknown mentor before the acknowledged McNutt. I still find it impossible to believe that my suggestion to the Mammoths became a reality. That it went from seeing Rog first in a biopic about Cromwell – which blew my socks off – to that unforgettable night at The Globe at the close of the Season watching him tear up that stage for seven hours or so as Falstaff, and then to Fred. It was a force of nature up there. Staggering. And as our own Fred Thursday. Those eyes. That voice.  A gift for any writer. To have that incredible instrument at your disposal. For eleven years. Don’t pinch me just yet. I’m not quite ready to leave that dream. Always hilarious to hear Rog say how he wouldn’t have signed on if he knew how long the tour of duty was going to be. Well – the race is nearly run.

Which brings me at last to Shaun Evans – we’ve joked about it together so often that it became a kind of shorthand – I don’t know whether it’s true or just another story or bit of television legend, but – and I can’t remember how it first came up between us, or in what context, but I quoted that Adam West line to him – you know, ‘The show’s called “Batman”.’  Which, I guess originally – if it’s true – was Mr West marking his territory, and just gently reminding everyone of his place in the scheme of things.  

For the record, Shaun’s never been in the least territorial. But the fact remains, the show’s called Endeavour. He has been since we shot in 2011 the hard point upon which the ultimate and absolute weight of the enterprise has rested. That’s not to diminish anyone’s role. But for the record, if I’d been hit by a 33 bus say – the show would rightly have gone on. The same could not be said of Shaun. He’s worn that responsibility very lightly – and been incredibly resilient and good-natured. These things have a lot of moving parts made of flesh and blood and feeling and insecurity and anxiety and pride, and the days are very long – because it doesn’t just end at the end of a shooting day – most people are looking at another four or six or in extreme cases eight hours of prep for the following day’s work. Actors have lines to learn – directors need to go over the next day’s shoot – producers have to call writers and tell them that a location has fallen through, and can we have pages to cover this by first thing, or whatever it is that producers do. Seriously – producers do so much. So much. But somehow Shaun’s moved through all of that with such incredible grace, and artistry, and above all things – his has been the most sustained act of creative and personal integrity. He has lived the show to the exclusion of all things else. And now he can breathe out. But wherever he goes next and whatever he does, there will always be some corner of a domestic and foreign programming schedule that will be forever Endeavour.

Beyond cast and crew – is the Skipper, Drama Don and Chief Tusker at Mammoth, Damien Timmer whom I’ve known man and boy and worked with on and off since the mid-90s. Beyond any of us – Endeavour is his baby. He has been midwife and mother to every moment of it. Working across every aspect of production with an eye for detail that leaves ordinary mortals in the dust. And somehow he brings this level of creative interrogation to all his shows. How he finds time to eat and sleep I will never know. But it’s been an enormous privilege and a personal joy to work alongside him these past years. Partners in crime. Quite literally. And then some.  

What’s been created these past eleven years is the sum of all that expertise and care outlined above, and rightly belongs to everyone aforementioned. They magicked every frame of it into life.

There’s a beautiful notion expressed by Sondheim in ‘Finishing the Hat’ from Sunday in the Park With George which sums it up. I’d hope he’d forgive my tweaking it from first person singular to first person plural.

“We made a hat where there never was a hat.”  

That’s it.  And that’s all.

We made a hat where there never was a hat.

Who could hope to do more?

DAMIAN: After all these interviews over the years, I don’t know how to thank you – perhaps any more than you can tell me what Thursday’s Wednesday sandwich is! Instead Russ, bespoke writer, purveyor of fine manuscripts, and, truly, the best and wisest of men, I shall simply say – as we’ve done countless times before – see you down the road.

RUSS: Too kind, old man. Too kind. It’s been a pleasure. And enormous thanks are due to you for your forbearance and indefatigability across these many many years. And for giving me the opportunity to look at these stories and the process whereby they came into being with the benefit of 20/20 hindsight – which, like the other thing, always lends enchantment. Thanks for going the distance. To the end, then?

DAMIAN: To the end…

‘“Do you think I’m wasting your time, Lewis?”

Lewis was nobody’s fool and was a man of some honesty and integrity.

“Yes, sir.”

An engaging smile crept across Barcroft’s mouth. He thought they would get on well together…’

– Ever so slightly misquoted from Last Bus to Woodstock with apologies to our late friend and inspiration, Mr. Colin Dexter.

Interview and introduction (‘Drinks at the Randolph’) copyright © Damian Michael Barcroft 2023

THE ENDEAVOUR INTERVIEWS 2023: ABIGAIL THAW

An exclusive Endeavour interview with Abigail Thaw

Interview copyright © Damian Michael Barcroft 2023

Please note that this interview contains spoilers for those who haven’t seen the final episode.

DAMIAN: Although you were just a kid in the early 70s – indeed, I remember you previously mentioned to me playing football in the streets and sitting outside pubs with a coke and a packet of crisps while the adults lived it up inside – you probably still remember the threat of power cuts and energy rationing, mass protests, trade union marches and strikes – not to mention the Cold War and possible nuclear attacks. Here we are in 2023 and much of the same is happening once again. As a society, we’ve not really done very well have we?

ABIGAIL: No. It’s depressing to me to see how many of our great services are in need of appreciation, respect and above all a decent living wage. It is extraordinary that the people who keep this country going are vilified and blamed for disrupting our lives. They are asking to be able to feed their families and live a decent life in exchange for enabling us to live ours.

It seems every profession that keeps this country going is at risk. These are essential  to our society. These people are risking their jobs and livelihood out of desperation, not a whim. They don’t get up in the morning and think ‘How can we mess with everyone’s day?’ They’re saying, ‘we cannot survive!’ So if you still want an NHS, trains, legal aid, education, Royal Mail then help us. Then we can her you.

It’s called society. We need these workers more than ever. And it’s disgusting to me that the government doesn’t engage and do something about it. It makes me ashamed.

DAMIAN: In terms of life experience, Dorothea Frazil has seen it all including the war in Korea, and yet, the audience is yet to see all of her as a much more complicated character than screen time sometimes allows. If there’s one issue that constantly reoccurs throughout my interviews with many of the regular cast throughout the years, it’s that so much of their scenes that reveal fascinating insights into their characters are often cut. Would you, like me and I imagine millions of worldwide fans of the show, support the idea of re-editing episodes so that the deleted scenes could finally be included?

ABIGAIL: Oh goodness, now wouldn’t that be nice! I would love to see everyone else’s personal journey. We’ll have to wait and see on that one.

DAMIAN: In addition to fans desperately wanting to learn more about their favourite characters, for me at least, one of the reasons I’d really like to see more is because I’d love to see how Dorothea interacts with other characters. So while we obviously often see her with Endeavour, and to a slightly lesser extent, Thursday and Strange, wouldn’t it be wonderful to see her interact more with other characters such as Max and Win for example?

ABIGAIL: Well, yes. As you say, there were scenes that Russ wrote with Win and Max. I remember in particular a nice one with Win where we share a cigarette when Joan is inside the bank as a hostage. You see Win the mother letting go and having a fag through sheer terror and Dorothea, childless but empathetic. Two women.

And I remember a scene with Max where we met up in the pub… happy times!

CODA (S3:E4) during the bank robbery

DAMIAN: I feel sure that Dorothea would get on famously with Max as they sat gossiping and drinking together – indeed, I’m still hoping for that spin-off for the two of you! – but what do you think Win would make of her if they spent more time together as they’re quite different women aren’t they?

ABIGAIL: I suspect there would be a little disapproval from Win and a little eye-rolling from Dorothea! But I would imagine they would get each other’s number fairly quickly and a mutual respect. Win has followed the rules, to a degree. She would be familiar to Dorothea in that age. Win’s done what she was brought up to do but also found her own personal path with the dancing lessons and getting a job. And I’ve always thought Dorothea does what she was brought up to do as well.

She is an anomaly from that period but I doubt she could be where she is if she didn’t have a strong sense of self. And that would have come from her upbringing. I sort of imagined a father who was ambitious for her and maybe wanted a boy initially but did what he could with a girl! He encouraged learning, determination and fearlessness. So she’s either done so much because of running from trauma and never feeling good enough or the reverse and feeling she can do anything. That’s a whole new story!

Kent Finn in GAME (S4:E1)

DAMIAN: We’ve had a couple of slight references to Dorothea dating and a less subtle relationship with Kent Finn which kind of crashed and burned. I remember you once telling me that as the series has progressed, Dorothea was a ‘little older’, ‘a little sadder’ but also ‘perhaps a little more hopeful.’ I’d hate to think of her as always living alone, drinking and smoking far too much like someone else I could mention. Do you think Dorthea is hopeful that she’ll meet someone special someday?

ABIGAIL: Hmm. Maybe. I think she has more optimism than Endeavour. Sometimes I think her advice to him is from the depths of her own experience: don’t turn out like me. On the other hand she knows how to have a good time and grabs it with both hands. There was a scene we couldn’t shoot for various reasons at the beginning of film 1 of Series 9 where they got me a beautiful vintage YSL suit to wear to the concert. It was fabulous and we shot a day in it. And I thought, ‘yeah, she’s still optimistic. She’s still got it going on!’ But she was also at the concert alone, so… I dunno.

DAMIAN: If Dorothea was a real person who happened to be a friend of yours and you were trying to fix her up on a date, how would you describe her?

ABIGAIL: Hah! Tricky one, let’s see: Opinionated. Good sense of humour. Laughs at herself but never at the work. Could probably drink you under the table. Can talk about pretty much any subject. Sassy. No games. Don’t expect her to cook you a meal but she’ll happily eat yours.

DAMIAN: I remember interviewing Charlotte Mitchell, one of the previous costume designers working on the show while it was still set in the 60s and I asked her about finding the right clothes for your character and she said, ‘Abigail has the most amazing figure. She is wonderful to dress and has to show an element of power dressing, yet she is still an attractive woman. In the 60s women would have been looked down on if they didn’t wear skirts in the office, and even though she is the boss so could flaunt these rules, there are standards she likes to keep up. She has a silhouette of the early 60s due to her age and formality which is a joy to design.’

How would you describe Dorothea’s look and how do you think it has changed as the show reaches 1972?

ABIGAIL: Charlotte is very kind. What a lovely thing to say. Costume fittings are always a case of subduing your self-consciousness and embracing the character. I think the look has softened as she gets into the 1970s. As has my figure! I love wearing trousers. But they don’t love me!

Wearing the trousers up until the end: Abigail’s last day filming (Photo by director, Kate Saxon)

DAMIAN: Do you like to have any input into what Dorothea might or might not wear?

ABIGAIL: Oh yes. We have been very lucky with our costume designers and I have a lot of input. There will always be a discussion beforehand and then the designer will send suggestions and get the general palette but you discover the final look together as you try things on. Often it’s a complete surprise as to what works and looks and feels right. I like to be comfortable as Abigail.

And I like as little fuss as possible – tricky when you have hair that needs taming for the 1960s. It was always a battle of the hairspray can with poor, long-suffering Irene Napier. But as Charlotte says, you have to remember the times you’re portraying and the character, so you need to be reminded you can’t rock up in jeans and flats. Not when you’re running a newspaper as a woman in the 1960s.

DAMIAN: Have you kept any of Dorothea’s clothes or anything else as souvenirs from the show?

ABIGAIL: Maybe… Perhaps an aforementioned suit. And a newspaper…

DAMIAN: As you were about to do the read-throughs for the final three scripts, what were you looking for or perhaps hoping to find in your final scenes?

ABIGAIL: I really wasn’t expecting anything. At one point I thought I might have been killed off. So it was a surprise to find I was in all three episodes. The older Morse never mentions a Dorothea as far as I’m aware although you’d have to ask Russ.

I was delighted that she is so jolly at the wedding. That she’s dancing and flirting and having a good time. And, she catches the bouquet! So that’s pretty optimistic. Maybe she meets the person of her dreams after all…

DAMIAN: Beyond your character, what were your impressions of the script more generally for the very final episode and also how Russ might reconcile and explain why John Thaw’s Morse never mentioned Fred Thursday?

ABIGAIL: I loved the script. It made me cry. Especially that image of the jags, echoing the first episode and symbolising everything. Russ is brilliant at doing so much with so little. And the joy of the wedding. Everyone having fun. Except the utter tragedy of it. And no, Morse will not mention Thursday again because he broke his heart. There are few grey areas for Morse. He is protecting Thursday and protecting himself by trying to forget him. Which we all know is impossible. And Thursday is the father of the love of his life. Who has also broken his heart. The whole Thursday family is a minefield!

DAMIAN: And how do you think the final episode of Endeavour compares to the final episode of Inspector Morse?

ABIGAIL: I couldn’t begin to compare. They are very different animals. With Endeavour we know it is leading on to something else.

STRIKER (S8:E1)

DAMIAN: This is Your Life was referenced in the previous series with Lewis Macleod playing Eamonn Andrews and I couldn’t help but wonder what you remember about your appearance on the show in 1981 when your father was handed the big red book?

ABIGAIL: I remember a lot. In fact I did it twice, the first time with Sheila. I was a very self-conscious teenager with dad’s so it wasn’t an altogether happy memory but it was fascinating. But that’s another story…

This Is Your Life broadcast 18th March 1981

DAMIAN: Having spent time in Oxford as a child when visiting your mother who was a mature student there and involved with marches and meetings for the Women’s Movement during the early 70s and given that both your father and yourself have obviously spent so much time filming on location there, do you feel sentimental towards Oxford or emotionally tied to the city in any way after all these years?

ABIGAIL: Absolutely. I love it there. There’s a very strong connection. And my stepfather and younger brothers went there. I should say, I didn’t just visit my mother, I lived with her. I went to nursery school while she was there.

Abigail’s daughter plays Abigail’s mother, Sally Alexander, in ORACLE (S7:E1)

And, I was at the first Women’s Liberation conference that Russell wrote about in series 7. There’s a film called Misbehaviour staring Keira Knightly as my mother set at that time. Worth a watch!

And Keira Knightly as Sally Alexander

DAMIAN: I don’t know if it’s because I’m such a geek or because I care so much about the characters – of course, I might be guilty on both counts! – but I’ve frequently pestered Russ with ridiculously pedantic questions about Dorothea such as how she got into journalism and why she stopped working as a war correspondent and author.

Although he has told me that he thinks he remembers invoking some of the great women war correspondents of World War II with you – particularly Lee Miller in Hitler’s Bathtub as a possible inspiration in Dorothea’s life – he also mentioned to me that he never went into her hinterland any more than one went into the childhood history of Jake Gittes (Jack Nicholson in Chinatown) or Harry Morgan (Humphrey Bogart) or his rummy companion (Eddie played by Walter Brennan) in To Have and Have Not.

Lee Miller, American photographer and photojournalist

Furthermore, Russ mentioned most recently about not filling in more detail than necessary, which gives the audience room to wonder. Do you think that this approach not only achieves this but also gives you more freedom as an actor?

ABIGAIL: Yes, I think it does. I love Russ’s cultural references. There are few as well read or well versed on culture, old and new, as Russ. He knows not to burden an actor when it’s the long game. Otherwise you can be held back on potential plot twists or character traits. And that would jar with the audience too. It’s fun to enjoy your own fantasy life for the character you’re playing.

Martha Gelhorn: American novelist, travel writer, journalist and arguably one of the great war correspondents of the 20th century

I read a lot of Martha Gelhorn’s work to inspire me. And of course, I did always have a book of Lee Miller’s photos by my bed when we were filming, but I never spoke to Russ about the finer details of his own inspiration for the character.

DAMIAN: And, although he’s not necessarily comparing Dorothea to them, but rather using them as examples, isn’t it interesting that he’s referenced such iconic characters played by Academy Award-winning actors in such legendary films when discussing your role?

ABIGAIL: Well, I was going to say… I did notice that. No pressure, then! Just as well I hear that now rather than at the beginning…

DAMIAN: In our last interview, I asked you, intertextual Freudian nightmares aside, I often think that Dorthea and Endeavour would make a great couple were it not for their age difference and if he ever had a long term girlfriend, wouldn’t she have a good reason to be jealous of his relationship with Dorothea and your reply was so brilliant and insightful that I’d like to quote it again in full…

‘Well, probably. In the sense that Dorothea has access to parts of his interior life that he doesn’t share lightly. So even though it’s not sexual, it is intimate. When people ask me why Endeavour and Dorothea don’t get together – apart from the Freudian nightmare! – I think of the ancient Greeks’ belief that friendship is more valuable than erotic love: the latter makes things messy and ultimately can end. Friendship endures and deepens.’

…Given that the friendship between Dorothea and Endeavour has indeed endured and deepened over nine series, was there any added additional pressure as an actor to reflect this in your performance one last time?

ABIGAIL: Never pressure. Working with Shaun is so easy. Our problem was often that we’d run through a scene and think, that’s it! Can’t improve on that. It’s us! But of course we had to make it work for the director and audience too! Russ had an uncanny ability to check in to our off screen friendship. Although I have to say Endeavour can be surprisingly minty and sometimes downright rude.

At times the desire to exclaim ‘Ooooooo, get you!’ a la Kenneth Williams was too hard to resist after a take! But it’s only because Morse is hurting and is so bad at being vulnerable, isn’t he? That’s what often makes him snap.

DAMIAN: What was it like saying goodbye to a cast and crew who you’ve become friends with over the last decade?

ABIGAIL: Heartbreaking. But we will still see each other. Indeed we have quite a bit already.

DAMIAN: Looking back over thirty-six episodes of Endeavour, do you have a favourite episode or a scene that best encapsulates Dorothea?

ABIGAIL: So many! That’s a tough one. ‘Snappy Jenkins’ at the nuclear power station [HARVEST, S4:E4]. And talking to Morse about “girl trouble”. And gently admonishing Thursday with ‘You’ve got your job and I’ve got mine’ in the pub. That was an episode with a lot more background stuff for Dorothea that didn’t make the final edit.

HARVEST (S4:E4)

But I suppose most of all was the episode where I’m kidnapped and fight my assailant. That was a great episode to shoot. The row with Morse, the argument with my assistant, choking the villain, being rescued by Thursday! Joy.

GAME (S4:E1)

DAMIAN: As I said to you in our first interview, I think your father would have been so proud of you and your contribution to Endeavour. And, personally, I feel so proud to have had the opportunity of talking to you about Dorothea over the years. Abigail, thank you so very much.

ABIGAIL: And thank you very much, Damian. For your kind words and support. It has been an honour and a privilege.

Interview copyright © Damian Michael Barcroft 2023

THE ENDEAVOUR INTERVIEWS 2023: KATE SAXON

An exclusive Endeavour interview with director, Kate Saxon

Interview copyright © Damian Michael Barcroft 2023

DAMIAN: Apart from Shaun Evans, you have directed more episodes of Endeavour than anyone else. However, before we discuss these, can you tell me how you got into directing?

KATE: I was an actress first. I started acting at school and at 14 years old, was in the RSC, in a wonderful production called The Dillen, followed by its sequel, Mary, After The Queen. Ron Cook was the lead – and alongside a professional cast, the productions made use of many local people to make up the ensemble roles. I’d hoped they’d get me out of school occasionally! I went to a strict girl’s grammar school and hated it.

So I left school to move to a more modern 6th form drama college, then Hull Uni and studied English Lit and Drama. I spent a year out after, at first acting, then for the majority of the year, working in a psychiatric hospital (I was considering training to be a drama therapist), then I went to study acting at East 15, then graduated and acted for several years.

Acting wasn’t for me. I wasn’t well suited to waiting for someone to give me a job; I wanted to make my own work, and in rehearsals, I’d always be dying to know how the director would craft the production. I realised, eventually, that my head was behaving like a director’s, not an actor’s.

I used to direct community and youth theatre alongside my acting career and I managed to move into professional theatre directing from there. My first professional show was The Secret Garden at Salisbury Playhouse. Immediately after, I left the Playhouse and began my assisting years in Opera, which I adored; it’s there that I started to learn my craft as a director.

I’ve spent the majority of my career as a theatre director. Around 20 years ago, I added directing videogames to that, then around 10 years ago, started directing TV too. I got into TV via the Eastenders/BBC director training scheme, which was a brilliant beginning – a month of learning from scratch.

DAMIAN: Obviously actors audition, but how do directors get chosen to work on a project?

KATE: I don’t really know! It’s still a mystery to me. You’d have to ask the Execs and Producers who choose us!

But, in my experience of TV so far, it’s generally been because a producer or Exec has already seen my work and liked it. So they contact my agent and ask me to come in for a meeting. We’ll chat about the project (they usually send a script for me to respond to), and if they like what I have to say and feel we’ll work well together, then I guess that’s when the offers happen.

DAMIAN: When your agent sends you a script, what sort of material are you looking for and are there any genres that you find particularly interesting?

KATE: No, I don’t like to restrict myself to one genre or another. That’s why I’ve had such an eclectic career. I get bored easily and am far happier and achieve the most when I’m juggling several projects at once (my normal status quo). So, as long as the writing is good – and I think it’s a story worth telling, I’m invested.

Having said that, I’m definitely drawn to the ‘mess’ of humanity – the moments we cross a line or feel something unexpected. I’m not so keen on ‘clean’ or neat in terms of psychology in characters. The more complex the better, therefore.

DAMIAN: Did your background in directing theatre and opera have anything to do with you getting the job to direct your first Endeavour film, ZENANA, which of course, featured those magnificent sequences in the Venice opera house?

KATE: Yes, I’m sure it did. I met with Helen Ziegler (then Exec) and Jim Levison (then Producer) and we talked about the script for two hours. I remember Helen being very pleased to hear about my time working in opera and theatre. For me, that script was ideal! A rare chance to combine all my creative loves at once.

DAMIAN: Which departments do you collaborate with most closely during the pre-production stage in designing a visual plan for each film?

KATE: You really do need to collaborate closely with every department in pre-production. TV is a group effort. No one can do their best work in isolation. Good communication, and making sure my ‘vision’ (though I hate that word, sounds so pretentious!) is clear for all, is paramount, so that all departments have a direction to work on. And that ‘vision’ is in turn, about realising the writer’s intentions and working out how best to achieve that, alongside taking on board the overarching intentions of the Execs, in terms of their ambitions for the series.

It’s important to share your thoughts with the department heads early: bandying around ideas and inspirations with the Designers and DOP is a privilege. It’s also important to be responsive (and to respond quickly to queries), so as to enable the person asking the question to move on with their work. This is of utmost importance.

The visuals begin with the Location Managers and location hunting. Whenever I see somewhere that’s interesting, I’ll want Mad [Madelaine Leech], Designer, to come too – see if she feels it’ll work for her. The 1st AD and DOP will ideally come too. So right from that early on, we’re working as a team; imagining and conjuring together.

At the same time, I’ll be working with the Casting Director on ideas for the guest cast and we’ll hold auditions. Within a couple of weeks, it’s time to work with the Costume Designer too, looking at their idea boards, chatting about how we see the characters. The Make Up Designer will often attend those meetings too.

And of course work on the script is ongoing right through pre-production (and the shoot more often than not!). New drafts, rewrites. Notes. Discussing ideas and character arcs. So you also need to constantly adjust your plans according to script changes – and to ensure the team knows about any planned changes too.

The Design team is the busiest in terms of meetings to attend and emails I need to respond to: we have ‘page turn’ meetings, where I sit with the whole design department and we go through all design, set, dressing and props needs, for every scene. And there’s an unimaginable number of design emails every day, everything ranging from photos of sourced props to approve or reject, planned design and layouts of location sets to discuss, to the smallest details, such as what type-face I might want on a letter heading!

DAMIAN: In terms of camera angles and setups, how much of this is pre-planned and to what extent do they typically need to change on the day of filming?

KATE: For me, they’re not massively pre-planned. What I will do, is to create a shotlist that’s a brief bullet list of what shots I feel each scene needs. If I want a crane or drone or anything ‘extra’ like that (car mounts etc), then I need to make that decision early on, so that the equipment is booked and the time is allowed in the schedule.

I revisit my shotlists for the next day, the night before each shoot day, and invariably change it! Some directors love to storyboard everything and have a clear and set plan. That’s not for me. I think it’s because I come from a theatre background, so my strengths are in curating and leading in an ensemble environment – the fascinating job for me is in how to make the most of every cast member and every team member on that set. If you like, it’s effectively how to unlock the collective imagination and steer it on one course.

This approach means I do, of course, need a very clear head, and to know the script inside out, along with what I want to achieve from a scene. I’m a very decisive person. Annoyingly so, sometimes, I imagine. But this means I’m secure in my tastes and therefore not concerned that many voices will distil my ‘take’ in a negative way: I’m lucky in that it means I can quickly take on board the great offers, whilst also explaining why others don’t fit with the way I want to present the story, without finding the input distracting.

DAMIAN: Incidentally, does shooting on location – especially in bustling Oxford – require more intricate pre-planning and is it significantly less problematic to film in a studio?

KATE: Not for me, really. It does for the locations, design and assistant director teams! Of course there are issues such as crowd control when we’re filming in a busy part of Oxford, say. But for me, location shooting wins over studio sets every time. The possibilities tend to be greater. So, if anything, locations tend to unlock more opportunities. When you’re in a standing set, it can feel tough to find interesting shots when you’re just in a box.

DAMIAN: Which stage of a production do you find most artistically rewarding or challenging: pre-production, the actual shoot or post-production?

KATE: Honestly, all three in different ways. Pre-production can be where the most rewarding work happens on the script or on finding the perfect actor for a role. The shoot is where the magic happens. Then the edit and post is where you get to sculpt it. It’s amazing how much you can restructure the way you choose to tell a story in post-production.

DAMIAN: Is there an implicit understanding that a director working on an Endeavour film should remain consistent with the visual style of the “Morse Universe” or are they encouraged to pursue their own visual aesthetics?

KATE: The latter. Damien [Timmer], Exec, has always loved the Eps that have a strong individual style. And Russ [Lewis], has written such brilliant and wide ranging stories. Russ has an excellent ear for dialogue and a sharp and insightful brain – it’s always a great challenge trying to keep up with him.

In terms of different aesthetics with which to shoot these scripts, last year, for example, when I had a story to tell [TERMINUS] that was set in a haunting shut up hotel and demanded lots of snow, it was abundantly clear that a different approach was needed. It had elements that owed a lot to Agatha Christie, others to noir, or thriller genres.

Alongside this freedom, there are always nods to Morse. My final Ep of Endeavour, (and the final Endeavour Ep ever of course!), has a scene that owes a lot to Morse, even down to me emulating some shots and in the use of supporting artists at a key moment. I can’t say what it is, but it’ll be interesting to see if the fans spot it. 

DAMIAN: Is it purely coincidental that you’ve directed ZENANA, TERMINUS and EXEUNT which are all the third and final films of series 7, 8 and 9 respectively?

KATE: No, when I first came on board with the Mammoth team, it just happened to be the final Ep of the series that I was offered. From then on, it made sense to keep it that way. I like getting to wrap up all the juicy stories and get some ‘big numbers’ to stage!

DAMIAN: What was it like working with Matt on the Opera sequences for ZENANA and his scores for Endeavour more generally?

KATE: Wonderful. Matt and I really interrogate the story and intentions. He loves me to talk him through what my goals are for the film overall, as well as how I see the character journeys and obstacles. He likes to respond to what I have to say as well as what he sees – it’s a combination of his responses as a viewer (what touches him when he watches the Final Cut) – and how I want to steer it. ZENANA was especially exciting because he wrote an original short opera for the piece, which Russ wrote the libretto for.

Matthew Slater’s cameo
Matt and Kate

DAMIAN: Which one of Russ’ scripts has surprised you the most?

KATE: Last year’s episode [TERMINUS]. It was dark and quirky! It also had elements borrowed from Carry On films (alongside the influences I mentioned above). Russ loves, loves, loves, drawing from all sorts of literary and film sources and writing nods to them in Endeavour. I swear I miss more of them than I catch!

DAMIAN: I’m a great admirer of Anton and consider him to be one of our very finest actors and so I was absolutely shocked when he told me that he didn’t know how to play the scene where he hears about the death of his wife in ZENANA, but apparently you reassured him that he absolutely could. Can you tell me any more about this from your perspective as a director and describe your approach of putting actors at ease in order to get the best possible performance from them – especially, when quite often, the shooting schedule doesn’t always allow for much time to rehearse?

KATE: Firstly, Anton is, as you say, the most exquisite and truthful actor. He handled that moment brilliantly. Anton is quite right when he said he didn’t know how to play it: he was open about that with me, as he says in your interview. That was because Bright is quite a closed book in terms of his emotional life, so Anton queried whether he should bat the truth of it away – almost be angry at the revelation at first. I suggested that rather than do that, he just allow Bright to try to listen to what he was being told… to truly hear it, whilst being aware this would be extraordinary news to hear, and therefore difficult to take in. That rather than battle it, he could try to comprehend it, through a defensive wall that was trying its best to suppress it. It’s that juxtaposition between the hidden inner emotions and the outer resolve that’s so painful and truthful.

And I did tell him he absolutely knew how to do that. Because Anton is one of the most emotionally open and brave actors I’ve ever worked with. So much so, he’s like the lightest touchpaper – utterly responsive. You’d never want to give a generalised or ill-thought-through note to Anton. If you earn his trust, he’ll take whatever suggestions you offer him. Therefore, as a director, your suggestions really count, so they’ve got to be good!

And you’re right about time: we didn’t have any rehearsal time for that scene ahead of the shoot. This was all done in a few discreet conversations on set. A huge part of my job as a director is to reassure an actor that they can reach the most nebulous or challenging emotional moments of their character’s journey. To do that, they must feel safe and must be able to trust me. They’re the one in front of the camera, so it’s really important to me that they know I have their back.

That means me understanding their characters well and making astute observations about how a moment might land. In a nutshell, it means me doing my homework. Actors can sniff out a director’s lack of knowledge in a nanosecond.

It also means offering notes and suggestions when they need them and keeping quiet when they don’t. It means listening to them and being their ‘performance confidante’ in a sense, i.e. someone they can bounce ideas off and who they’re not afraid will judge, so they can try anything.

Additionally, it means giving them time and not rushing. This last statement is the hardest to achieve on a TV set, when the clock is ticking. A good 1st AD is our ally in that, as they’ll often schedule tricky emotional scenes early in the day, in order to try to avoid that end of day rush.

DAMIAN: Why do you think you were given the honour of directing the final Endeavour film?

KATE: It IS a great honour, isn’t it? I imagine it must be because Mammoth, Russ, Shaun and Rog, were happy with what I’d done before… I certainly hope so.

DAMIAN: And was there any additional pressure for you given the expectations of a huge and devoted fanbase who’ve watched and loved these characters for a decade?

KATE: Yes, absolutely. Having worked with the cast for 3 seasons, I knew how much care they have for serving their characters well. Especially for Shaun and Roger, knowing that Morse never mentions Thursday again, meant they felt a huge responsibility to tell the story of why that could be, with integrity and heart. They’re both brilliant actors and collaborators, so we talked a lot about how we would sculpt that story; what their emotional truth was. I’m honoured they’ve trusted me these last three years and let me join with them in partnership.

Damien and Russ also felt the pressure of how to close the series faithfully. So it meant there was a lot of discussion about what the script should be. It also meant we deliberately left the script overlong for the shoot, so that we had options in the edit. This meant shooting fast, when of course I’d have loved a luxurious shoot where I felt I had time to really craft something special. Every director of course wants that! It was more a case of hit the ground running and never breathe, pause or look back until it was in the bag… Directing TV drama is always such a whirlwind, that I never quite know whether it’s marvellous or a big old mess by the end.

In fact, the truth is probably bits of each. Then you try to curate that well in post production until it’s cohesive and impelling. That’s the aim. Ultimately, we just have to hold our breath and wait to see what the viewers think.

DAMIAN: Kate, thank you very much indeed.

KATE: Thank you for asking such great questions!

Interview copyright © Damian Michael Barcroft 2023

THE ENDEAVOUR INTERVIEWS 2023: SARA VICKERS

ENDEAVOUR: Marry me.

JOAN: That’s not funny.

ENDEAVOUR: It wasn’t meant to be.

JOAN: I know. You were being nice. I don’t want pity. I couldn’t live with that. Never mind what Dad would say…

– HARVEST (S4:E4)

An exclusive Endeavour interview with Sara Vickers

Interview copyright © Damian Michael Barcroft 2023

DAMIAN: Sara, I’m thinking back to when Russ told me he knew that Joan and Endeavour would fall for each other the moment she first opened the front door to him in FUGUE (S1:E2) and everything that has happened to your character since then including being taken hostage during the bank robbery, running away from home, being a victim of domestic violence, suffering a miscarriage and getting entangled in an on-again, off-again relationship during which she and Endeavour ultimately broke each other’s hearts. Even though she didn’t want his pity during that scene in HARVEST, do you think there might have been the briefest of moments when Joan considered saying yes to Endeavour when he asked her to marry him?

SARA: That moment in HARVEST really encapsulates the essence of why Joan and Morse haven’t got together. What he should have said to her was those three magic words, “I love you.” I think if he had, we would have travelled a different path. To be offered marriage out of the blue, in such an emotionally turbulent moment, left her, I think, unable to process the proposal. It was clumsy of Morse. And if he was serious, he should have followed it up, fleshed out where it came from.

DAMIAN: And I wonder if there was ever a moment’s hesitation before Joan accepted Strange’s marriage proposal?

SARA: We have talked a lot about this during the filming of season 9. The hesitation. The feeling of something being unfinished. With Morse being absent from Oxford, again, I think the decision to get engaged was definitely easier and a positive one. A step in the right direction. She desperately needed to move her life forward. Strange has given her the chance of a new future. But Morse is always in her thoughts. I know he would have been a part of the decision process for her. And I think you can definitely see that hesitation in episode 2. He’s always been an enormous pull for her. Shutting that door for good will be painful.

DAMIAN: After not seeing each other for some time, Endeavour speaks to Joan at Belmont Lodge, the halfway house for mothers and their children, in STRIKER (S8:E1) and Russ’ directions read: ‘Endeavour alone for a moment. Through the window, Joan up the garden for the moment with some of the kids. He could be looking out of the window of his own house at his wife and kids. It’s a thought that might have stung once, now it’s just a dull ache.’ Away from the aforementioned scene in HARVEST, to what extent do you think Joan ever seriously considered the possibility of marrying Endeavour and having kids with him, and at what point did she become more realistic and arguably mature enough to abandon any such dreams?

SARA: Every little look and moment they’ve shared have been thoughts of ‘could we?, should we….?’. And those thoughts for Joan, were always thoughts of ‘could we make this work for the long haul, marriage and kids.’ Even though she rebelled when she ran away from home, I think she ultimately wants what her mum and dad have, true love and a family. These dreams have become faded and less frequent however. As time goes on it is hard to keep yearning.

DAMIAN: During the same scene in STRIKER and in reference to vulnerable mothers, Endeavour observes that Joan is ‘Saving the world’ and she replies, ‘One woman at a time.’ Looking back over all these years now, what was most fun for you to play as an actor, the young and playful kind of cute girl next door figure that we met in the first series or the stronger and more empowered woman we have come to know in these last few series?

SARA: Hmmm, good question… I think I’ve been getting quite nostalgic for the early days. I loved the carefree girl next door…early 60s outfits, beehives – though I don’t miss the backcombing and buckets of hairspray! – and flirting and teasing Morse. There was a playful simplicity.

DAMIAN: I know from reading various drafts of the scripts over the years that certain scenes were cut and some of these involved Joan and Strange. One particular scene that I remember reading years ago was where she kisses him on the cheek as they say goodnight – in the version that made it to the screen it was after their date at the Masonic Lodge Ball in SCHERZO (S8:E2) and Strange says, ‘Blimey, I won’t wash my face for a week now’. Therefore, Russ must have been planning this storyline for a long time so although there were strong hints during series 8, at what point were you made aware of the collective romantic fates of Joan, Strange and Endeavour, and what was your reaction?

SARA: I think I was told by Shaun Evans in a read-through for an earlier season. Perhaps 4 or 5? At the time I couldn’t see how it was going to come about. My biggest concern was wanting to have an ending for Joan that felt organic and not rushed or too contrived. Scenes were cut between Strange and I, as dramaturgically, it was agreed it was moving too fast; we had to find that balance of making it fully fleshed out but also interesting story telling.

DAMIAN: Back in NOCTURNE (S2:E2) which was set in 1966, Joan and her friend go on a double date with none other than Endeavour and Strange! With the benefit of hindsight, do you think that Russ knew even back then that Joan and Strange would one day become romantically involved?

SARA: I think season 2 may have been a little early to know, as Russ had only just decided Joan and Morse were going to become emotionally involved. So I reckon that may have just been coincidence.

DAMIAN: And again, retrospectively, isn’t it quite interesting to recall your response and consider you were at least half right in answering a similar question I asked you previously regarding the possible future of Joan and Endeavour when you answered, ‘Well, we know there will be no white wedding.’? 

SARA: Well that was the biggest obstacle to the Joan and Morse romance, Morse’s fate was already set in stone. But it’s wonderful that the audience keeps willing them to get together even though they know how it ends.

DAMIAN: In addition to her relationships with both Endeavour and Strange, it might also be interesting to remember that Joan went out on a date with Peter Jakes in HOME (S1:E4). All three are obviously policemen who were under the command of her policeman father. What do you think a psychoanalyst might have to say about all this?

SARA: Haha! I think they would have a field day! She never ventured very far from her Dad’s workforce. But I guess there is something she likes about a policeman. She knows the positives and negatives of life as a policeman. And there is obviously something she admires about a man in that line of work.

DAMIAN: You once used the word ‘intrigued’ to describe Joan’s attraction to Endeavour and continued that, ‘She is not one for the ordinary and Endeavour appears to be everything out of the ordinary. They have something they can’t put their finger on. But surely that’s the best kind of attraction – the indescribable.’ In comparison, I’m intrigued to know how you would describe her attraction to Strange?

SARA: I think the intrigued, indescribable quality that Morse showed, started to feel to Joan like emotionally unavailable. Always putting his work first, or so it seems to her. We see him not appear at the pub in episode 2, UNIFORM. I think she knows that would be her life. Forever coming second. Strange on the other hand, is upfront and is there at the drop of a hat. In the season 8 finale [TERMINUS] when they can’t find brother Sam, he provides the support that Morse can’t. He’s there when she needs someone and there is something very powerful in giving your time.

DAMIAN: Discussing the character development of Strange over the years, Sean Rigby told me that in the 60s he was ‘very much trying to find himself [and that] he is very sure of where he wants to go in the world but is still unsure of his footing within it’ and in another interview with him regarding the 70s, said he was ‘Harder. Tougher. Self-assured. He’s his own man now.’ What effect do you think Joan has had on this harder, tougher and more self-assured Strange?

SARA: I think most positive romantic relationships only add to someone’s feelings of security and self worth which in turn bolsters confidence and a sense of ease in the world. Joanie would always be championing Jim personally and professionally. But the initial change in Strange was already in motion before she came on the scene, and was definitely a factor in why she started looking at him in a different way. I think Sean has charted that change in his character beautifully over the years. Watching his work in series 9, Strange is a different man from the early episodes. 

DAMIAN: And from “Brother Strange” to her own actual brother, Sam, what was it like being reunited with Jack Bannon once again?

SARA: So wonderful. He’s a joy to be around and a fabulous actor. We couldn’t have wrapped up the show without him. We reminisced about the early days of filming. We lived in the same area of London for the first few series so we used to get picked up together and have lovely chats. I missed him not being around these last few years.

DAMIAN: Can you describe your emotions and thoughts as you filmed your final scenes and said goodbye to the cast and crew you’ve worked with for over a decade?

SARA: Filming the final series was an altogether surreal experience. I had just given birth six weeks prior to my first day, so emotionally and physically I had been through significant changes. Having my baby with me on set was wonderful but as you can imagine didn’t allow me to dwell too much on the finality of it all. I’m sure this was a good thing as I would have been a teary mess!

DAMIAN: Looking back at all the episodes over the years, do you have a favourite or a particular scene that you are most proud of as an actor?

SARA: Oh goodness. So many moments I could pick out. Again, as I’m getting nostalgic about everything, I think I would have to go for the date with Jakes in HOME. That was when I found Joan. Her true character. And I think Shaun and I found something in that scene when Morse walks her home, that stood the test of time.

DAMIAN: My final question, if Joan was a real person and a good friend of yours in real life, what romantic advice would you have given her in 1965 when she first started flirting with Endeavour?

SARA: He’s never going to tell you what you want to hear. You either need to take the lead and be okay with that or cut your losses and save yourself years of heartache.

DAMIAN: Sara, in addition to Endeavour and Strange, Joan has also stolen the hearts of countless viewers around the world with your thoughtful, sensitive and perfectly charming performance. Thank you so much for sharing your thoughts on Joan in this and previous interviews over the years.

SARA: Thanks so much Damian, it’s been a pleasure. I was given a wonderful gift the day I was cast as Joan Thursday. I will be forever grateful for the opportunity and for all the love and support the fans have shown her over the years.

Interview copyright © Damian Michael Barcroft 2023

‘It was the view I fell in love with… You can’t see from there. Come closer.’
‘This is as close as I get.’ PASSENGER (S5:E3)

THE ENDEAVOUR INTERVIEWS 2023: SEAN RIGBY

Interview copyright © Damian Michael Barcroft 2023

Little acorns and strange bedfellows

An exclusive Endeavour interview with Sean Rigby

DAMIAN: There was both good and bad news back in 2012. The bad news was that you didn’t get a part in Lewis, but the good news was that you did get a part in Endeavour. Thinking back to when you first received that telephone call from your agent saying that you had landed the role of Jim Strange and you performed an impromptu Irish jig on the Barons Court tube station platform, did you ever think that you’d still be playing him a decade later?

SEAN: I can honestly say I hadn’t a clue as to just how long I’d be playing Jim Strange, and what a hugely important part of my life it would become. 

DAMIAN: But did you have any idea – or at least your own personal hopes – of how long the show would continue for?

SEAN: With it being my first job, I didn’t have a clue about how the industry worked from a production standpoint, or the criteria it would have to meet in order to be longstanding and successful. I hoped at the time it would at least run for a few years. 

DAMIAN: And how did you feel when it was confirmed that this would be the final series?

SEAN: It was bittersweet. It could never last forever and it seemed like a good moment for it to stop. The overwhelming feeling was one of gratitude to have been part of something so loved.

DAMIAN: In our original interview, you described Strange as having something of the Auguste clown about him and I wondered – as the series has gradually become frequently darker and Strange more serious – if you missed playing the more obvious comedic aspects to the character?

SEAN: I would argue that a lightness persists in Strange, even in the dark times. If anything, it’s been nice to have more of the serious stuff to do to counterbalance that. 

DAMIAN: Although, wasn’t it amusing to see poor Strange not knowing where to put his face during the scenes at the nudist hotel last series?

SEAN: Certainly was! I didn’t know where to look either. And it was bloody cold that day, so fair play to the supporting artists and cast.

DAMIAN: Even though I still miss his legendary tank tops of yesteryear, I’m mostly hoping that we’ll get to see Strange play the trombone one last time or does he still just keep the instrument under his desk for emergencies only?

SEAN: Yes, in a glass box with a tiny hammer. I’d like to think the trombone is heavily implied throughout all scenes in CID.

DAMIAN: And in RAGA (S7:E2) we are treated to the unexpected sight of Strange wearing a pinny, holding a cookbook and learning the culinary arts! Were we ever to be invited to dine with Strange, what specialty might he prepare for us?

SEAN: Funnily enough I enjoy cooking myself and love collecting cookbooks. I have an original Galloping Gourmet cookbook, published in 1972. Leafing through that, and this is a genuine recipe, I think he might have a bash at ‘Fairfield flounder fillets and legal sauce’.

Photo provided by Sean Rigby

DAMIAN: Discussing the character development of Strange over the years, you told me before that in the 60s he was ‘very much trying to find himself [and that] he is very sure of where he wants to go in the world but is still unsure of his footing within it’ and in our last interview regarding the 70s, you said he was ‘Harder. Tougher. Self-assured. He’s his own man now.’ What effect do you think Joan Thursday has had on this harder, tougher and more self-assured Strange?

SEAN: I think if anything she has galvanised his determination and ambition. It’s all about looking after Joanie, who is also very supportive of him. 

DAMIAN: I know from reading various drafts of the scripts over the years that many scenes were cut and some of these involved Strange and Joan. One particular scene that I remember reading years ago was where she kisses him on the cheek as they say goodnight – in the version that made it to the screen it was after their date at the Masonic ball at the Lodge in SCHERZO (S8:E2) and Strange says, ‘Blimey, I won’t wash my face for a week now’. Therefore, Russ has obviously been planting these little acorns for a long time but when were you first made aware that this was one of the directions your character would be taking and what was your initial reaction to having the opportunity of exploring the less serious side of him again?

SEAN: I think it was as early as series two that somebody in production said to me ‘oh of course, Strange gets together with Joan.’ I thought ‘Really?’ – I don’t think we’d even had a scene together at the time, and had only met Sara at read-throughs. It became apparent over the last couple of series, the direction their relationship was taking, and it was exciting to get to work with Sara on some great scenes. 

DAMIAN: Endeavour and Strange went on a double date way back in 1966 during the episode NOCTURNE (S2:E2) – and let’s not forget that one of the girls was Joan. I asked you in a previous interview why Strange had never been out with a girl since then and you said that he was ‘Too busy for dates.’ What changed Strange’s mind?

SEAN: I don’t think anything changed his mind particularly. I think it was just fate, or happenstance. He had a spare ticket to the masonic ball, and there she was.

DAMIAN: I must say that the scenes with Strange and Joan last series were amongst my personal highlights of the three episodes. The two really do have an extraordinary – if somewhat unexpected – chemistry together, don’t they?

SEAN: That’s very kind of you to say. I can only doff my cap to Sara for being such an excellent, generous scene partner, and to Russ, for giving us such lovely scenes to work with. 

DAMIAN: Which of the following would you say have contributed most to the man Strange is today: the tragic events at Blenheim Vale in NEVERLAND (S2:E4), the death of George Fancy in ICARUS (S5:E6), the influence of his friends at the Lodge, getting seriously injured by the stabbing in ZENANA (S7:E3), his relationship to Joan Thursday or simply his own determination to climb to the top?

SEAN: I know it’s a cop out, but, all of them. These are the events in life, good and bad, that make a person. He is the sum of his experience.

NEVERLAND
ICARUS
ZENANA

DAMIAN: I thought the scene in ZENANA was interesting where Strange and Max almost take on the shared role of parents when Endeavour and Thursday are squabbling by the canal at the Towpath Killer scene of the crime and Strange says: ‘That’s the face we want to show the world now, is it? Washing out our dirty smalls in front of respected friends and colleagues. God almighty, what’s the matter with you? Well… I hope you’re both pleased with yourselves.’ Strange wouldn’t have dared to raise his voice and say these words before?

SEAN: I don’t think he’d ever been given cause to. We deal with a lot of dead bodies, so it would be easy for us as an audience to forget the solemnity of standing over the deceased. Their squabbling was unacceptable and they rightly got a bollocking from Max and Strange.

ZENANA

DAMIAN: If Strange met Endeavour in 1965 and the last Inspector Morse episode was in 2000, that means they will have known each other for 35 years which must be their longest continuous friendship. However, now you’re able to look back on their complicated relationship from 1965 to 1972, how do you think it has evolved across those first seven years?

SEAN: If it’s possible, they’ve simultaneously grown closer and further apart.

Endeavour and Strange meet for the first time in GIRL (S1:E1)
The odd couple living together in MUSE (S5:E1)

DAMIAN: In terms of bringing closure to your interpretation and portrayal of the character at least, what were you hoping to find in the last three scripts and how does the Strange at the final stages of Endeavour compare to James Grout’s introduction in Inspector Morse?

SEAN: I was hoping for there to be a happy ending for Jim, I thought he deserved it. In terms of bridging the gap, I think we see Strange well on his way up the ladder.

DAMIAN: Referencing the older Strange of the novels, I mentioned chocolate biscuits in our first interview, and you told me that your personal favourite was the Garibaldi. Now, in SCHERZO, Strange says the following: ‘I’ve conducted some odd interviews in my time, matey. But stone me, this morning’s go takes the Garibaldi.’ Art imitating life, perhaps?

SEAN: Given that Russell might have the broadest range of reference I think I’ve ever encountered, it doesn’t seem too unlikely that the contents of these interviews might make their way into the script somehow. 

DAMIAN: In comparison to Endeavour or Thursday, Russ once told me that in Riggers’ hands, Strange is ‘a wonderful everyman.’ Do you think this might be why so many of the men in the audience relate to Strange more than other male lead characters in the show?

SEAN: If they do then that could possibly be why. I think characters like Strange are important, not everyone is incredibly witty or brave or brilliant. I think if we’re honest with ourselves, given the situations that Oxford’s Finest find themselves in, most of us would be stood scratching our head, brows furrowed. 

DAMIAN: Do you have a favourite episode of Endeavour or is there a scene that you think perfectly sums up Strange as a character?

SEAN: I think the scene from a few series back where Strange pops round to Morse’s house, interrupting his evening with Ludo, is fairly illustrative of the type of person Jim Strange is. Even though he’s come round to give Morse a ticking off, he’s decent enough not to do it in front of his friend, going so far as to make small talk with the rather aloof character that is Ludo.

ORACLE (S7:E1)

DAMIAN: Can you tell me about filming your final scene as Strange and what it was like saying goodbye to a cast and crew that you’ve worked with over the last decade?

SEAN: Truth be told, all I can remember was that it was in CID. Everything else is a bit of a blur. I wouldn’t count myself as a particularly sentimental person, indeed I didn’t shed a tear on the day, but rather like I said earlier, I’ve felt an enormous sense of gratitude and kinship with all involved. It’s been a real honour. 

DAMIAN: Brother Rigby, it has been my honour to do these interviews with you over the years so thank you very much indeed. I wish you all the very best and hope that all your future roles will inspire more impromptu Irish jigs – Cheers, matey!

SEAN: Thanks Damian, your support throughout has been greatly appreciated. Mind how you go. 

~

Interview copyright © Damian Michael Barcroft 2023

THE ENDEAVOUR INTERVIEWS 2023: ROGER ALLAM

To-day we have naming of parts. Yesterday,
We had daily cleaning. And to-morrow morning,
We shall have what to do after firing. But to-day,
To-day we have naming of parts. Japonica
Glistens like coral in all of the neighbouring gardens,
And to-day we have naming of parts.

First stanza of Naming of Parts from the Lessons of War collection of poems by Henry Reed

NAMING OF PARTS

An exclusive Endeavour interview with Roger Allam

Interview copyright © Damian Michael Barcroft 2023

DAMIAN: What do you remember of your first foray into the world of Colin Dexter and working with John Thaw in the episode, Death Is Now My Neighbour, from the original Inspector Morse series?

ROGER: I don’t remember a great deal actually. Certainly not about the plot. I was very glad that my great friend John Shrapnel was in it with me. John Thaw I knew through Sheila Hancock at the RSC where I had worked with her both as actress and director. So he was very nice to me. I was very inexperienced in terms of television having worked up to then mainly in the theatre, so was hugely glad to be in it as I’d always loved the series.

DAMIAN: There was 33 episodes of Inspector Morse and the same number for the follow-up, Lewis. A prequel to the original was announced to be broadcast in 2012 and I believe there was initially a suspicion by some in the industry that Endeavour was a cynical attempt to try and exploit the franchise further. However, what was your initial reaction when you were first offered the role of Detective Inspector Fred Thursday?

ROGER: We started while Lewis was still being made and broadcast. Many of the crew worked on both. But I don’t think the impulse to make Endeavour was a cynical one. I certainly didn’t think so when I was offered Thursday. My initial reaction was one of great interest in that I had never played a role like him before.

OVERTURE

DAMIAN: So, here we are, over ten years and 36 episodes later. Each episode – although, given their quality and length, they should really be referred to as films – is usually shot over 23 days, 5 days a week – apart from when you shoot on location in Oxford which also requires additional shooting over the weekend. Given that this is obviously a huge commitment for such an award-winning and in-demand actor such as yourself, do you think that you would have originally signed up to play Thursday if you had known back then that Endeavour would last for nine series?

ROGER: I was very apprehensive about doing a long running series and my heart sank when they asked for an initial three years. I only agreed to two. So if they’d asked for nine at the start I think I would have run a mile. I think the executives at Mammoth, Damien Timmer and Michele Buck, were very sensible and canny to, in the end, just do it by the year. Shaun and I relaxed into it and realised that even four films gave us time to do other work in the year.

DAMIAN: While preparing for the role, I believe that the writer, Russell Lewis, suggested that you might find something to draw on by taking a look at Henry Reed’s Lessons of War. One of the poems in this collection, Naming of Parts, consists of two distinct voices: an experienced superior officer giving an arms lesson to his young and innocent recruit who can’t help but think of Spring, making love and the mechanics of sex rather than the mechanics of a rifle. It can be read as a clash between uniformity and freedom, conventional versus individualistic, and of course, the gulf between old ways and new ideas so there’s some obvious parallels there between Endeavour and Thursday. Additionally, the poem was quoted by Thursday at the end of the film, COLOURS (S5:E4), but to what extent do you think the poem and its themes originally influenced your interpretation of the Fred Thursday audiences know and love today?

ROGER: I don’t remember Russ talking about Henry Reed at the start though I do remember him doing so before COLOURS. The theme of the war though was always present in mine and Russ’ thoughts about Fred’s character. The memory of the awful violence endured was always there to be tapped into if he lost his temper. As he sometimes did.

COLOURS

DAMIAN: Furthermore, Russ has also told me that Thursday’s war record mirrors that of L/Cpl W.H. Lewis of the Eighth Army fighting in North Africa, El Alamein, Italy and Austria. Did you ever look into and research influences such as these or was there enough detail in the script for you to find Thursday?

ROGER: I certainly researched stuff about the soldier’s experience of war. There’s a lot on google and I found two books very helpful to dip into ‘ Time to Kill’ by Paul Addison and Angus Calder, and ‘The Desert War” by Alan Moorhead. Also both my grandfathers had fought in WW1 and many uncles had in WW2, so the memory of those wars was ever present for me growing up. One of my earliest memories is playing on the ‘bomb site’ round the corner in the East End of London where I was born. And of course talking with Russ about all this. And, of course, there was a lot to go on in the scripts as well.

I had an Uncle Fred who fought in WW2 and an Aunt Win, a brother and sister of my father, so that generation of my wider family were also always very present in my thoughts about Fred.

DAMIAN: A large part of Thursday’s early life would have seen the harsh realities of the Depression and then later more positive aspects such as the Attlee government and the creation of the Welfare State and the NHS. How do you think factors such as these shaped Thursday not only as a husband and a father, but also as a policeman?

ROGER: There was a huge drive after WW1 to create the ‘land fit for heroes’. This fueled Atlee and many of his officer class generation, having experienced that dreadful war and got close to ‘the men’, who of course also strove for a better life. This was thwarted by fear on the part of the capitalist class of Communist revolution and the General Strike. So that impulse for a better life for all was delayed and frustrated until the second Labour government after WW2. To me Fred was very much an Atlee man. There was a line, possibly in the pilot, something like “I didn’t tramp halfway round Europe to come back and find the country being run by spivs and chancers“. All these experiences shaped Fred as a man, husband and father. The family was ultimately what he fought for. Being a policeman was still for him a version of fighting for that better life, or fighting to protect it, and protect the family. That’s why he hated corruption in the police, and why it was so awful when he fell, or nearly did.

DAMIAN: Would you agree that when the Thursday family was first introduced in FUGUE (S1:E2), your character took on an extra dimension and became even more interesting to play?

ROGER: The family was what made me want to play the character. Originally they were going to be in the pilot but there was not enough time to include that story element in a single film. The Thursday family gave many opportunities, early on, to show that human warmth and love that Endeavour yearns for but is outside of. Later on, as Joan and Sam get older, the family relations become more complicated.

FUGUE

DAMIAN: In my previous interviews with Jack Bannon and Sara Vickers, they both said what fun you were on set with your dry sense of humour and that you originally helped them to get into the 60s era with memories of your own childhood. Would it be too much of an intrusion to ask for an example of the sort of historical anecdotes you shared with them?

ROGER: Well, of course, if you’re filming a series set in the 60s and 70s it is a revelation and something of a shock – albeit at the same time rather exotic – to the younger generation that we could cope without so much stuff. Lots of people didn’t have cars but most importantly there were no mobile phones so getting around, keeping people informed, knowing where you were going, taking photos, and looking stuff up was a totally different experience. We had to have maps like the A to Z! You had to look things up in a book! My parents had a wind up gramophone in the 50s and bought an electric record player in the 60s. I think we had at most six LPs. I can’t remember a specific  anecdote, but I think it was more part of a general ongoing conversation, with additions from any crew member nearer my generation.

DAMIAN: As you mentioned, with the introduction of the Thursday family, Endeavour felt part of a warm and loving home which he himself never fully experienced in his own childhood. Perhaps particularly in light of his father dying in HOME (S1:E4), I wondered if – in the early days of the show at least – Thursday loved Endeavour as a trusted friend and colleague or like a surrogate son?

ROGER: Well, he could be part of it a bit, but also not part of it and an outsider at the same time. Indeed, there was a surrogate son element to their relationship, though that isn’t necessarily something Fred would be aware of at the time. It’s a relationship that an older and younger man can fall into in a work situation. Especially where there is rank involved. Especially when the relationship is good and caring. Teacher/pupil also. Fred has seen something in Endeavour that he wants to nurture, something that could make him a great detective. Also Endeavour sometimes looks after Fred, sometimes teaches him, the roles can easily reverse.

HOME: After the death of Endeavour’s father

DAMIAN: Obviously the relationship between the two has somewhat deteriorated over the years, particularly over the previous couple of series and as is often the case between Endeavour and Thursday, it’s what’s left unsaid that really resonates. An example of this might be the scene towards the end of CODA (S3:E4): ‘There was a bullet left in the chamber, whatever you told Cole Matthews, you knew it. You drew his fire’, and it’s the silence after this where the two seem to communicate best in these pauses and they are masters of an almost Pinteresque understatement in conveying their friendship and respect for each other. How would you describe their relationship and how it has evolved from the first film to the very last?

ROGER: Shaun and I often discussed what was left unsaid and hanging in the air so that we could hopefully bring atmosphere and depth to the scene. This was something that developed over the years. Mine and Shaun’s relationship as actors grew over time as did Fred and Endeavour’s as characters.

CODA

DAMIAN: I’ve observed over the years throughout various conversations and interviews with Russ that of all the new and original characters for Endeavour, as opposed to those created by Colin Dexter, Thursday was the one he perhaps infuses most with his own personality and past, particularly with reference to the dialogue with its wonderfully unique rhythms and tones, phrases, idioms and patterns of speech. Russ agreed that Thursday was possibly an idealised version of his old man who was of the same generation as Thursday, and that the dialogue is often stuff he remembers hearing from when he was a boy. I was wondering if you were aware of any of this and to what extent you agree that these “Russ-isms” slip into Thursday every now and again?

ROGER: I was aware that Russ was tapping into his father for Thursday in the same way as I was with my family. Russ used a lovely characterful idiom for Fred and I was certainly conscious of that and loved playing it. ‘Look after your shoes and your shoes look after you’. A cousin of mine picked up on that as something she remembered from childhood. Of course, I can’t remember many now but things like: ‘I’ll have your cobblers for a key fob’, ‘More under my hat than nits’, ‘Where am I going to keep ‘em? [pet birds] Up my arse, Winifred, like David Nixon!’, are quite simply great lines and great fun to play.

DAMIAN: There’s a wonderful scene in the film, CARTOUCHE (S5:E2), set in a cinema – one of those beautiful old picture palaces – where Thursday tells Endeavour about the films he watched as a kid on Saturday mornings such as those starring Laurel & Hardy and George Formby.

CARTOUCHE

And in TROVE (S2:E1), I was reminded of the old noir films and literature such as the work of Chandler, Hammett and all those great Humphrey Bogart movies of the thirties and forties, but I also noticed that there was perhaps the more particular British Noir influences such as Graham Greene and his Brighton Rock or The Third Man. Therefore, I was thrilled to hear Russ tell me that you yourself are something of a fan of the genre.

TROVE: Searching for Harry Lime?

Additionally, I know that you improvised a large part of the farewell speech at DS Peter Jakes’ leaving party at the Lamb & Flag pub during ARCADIA (S3:E2) that invokes all the Cowboy film titles so you must also have a passion for Westerns. Can you tell me a little bit about the films you saw as a child and the actors you admired most?

ROGER: I don’t really remember improvising Jake’s farewell speech! I certainly liked Westerns as a child and Noir when I was a teenager. I remember Russ coming into my trailer when by chance The Third Man was on the telly – one of the very few times the telly actually worked – at the famous Ferris wheel scene and we both watched it. It’s one of my very favourite films. I first saw it when I was about fourteen and it was the first time I’d seen a British film that had that particular sceptical tone about the aftermath of the war. I read a lot of Hammet , Chandler and Cain and saw the film adaptations. Of course, you draw on  influences from life, but also from films and plays and television. If you need to learn how to wear a hat, Bogart is your man. How to get off a horse, or out of a car and carry a gun, Clint. The Westerns and Noir films I saw a bit later than childhood were more useful as they were more morally ambiguous: Fords’ The Searchers, say, or Clint Eastwood’s Unforgiven. I still can’t watch Casablanca without crying. Cary Grant in his Hitchcock films is a wonder for what goes on behind his eyes.  Cagney in gangster films like Public Enemy is glorious in his theatricality and violence. 

DAMIAN: In terms of exploring the history of your character, I found SWAY (S2:E3) one of the most interesting films with such beautifully written, character-driven romantic scenes featuring Thursday and his old war sweetheart Luisa Armstrong who hadn’t seen each other in twenty years. If Luisa, after the ‘Fredo, hold me. Once. For what we were’ moment hadn’t have told Thursday never to come back, do you think he would have continued to see her in secret behind Win’s back?

ROGER: I don’t think he could have and lived with himself.

SWAY

DAMIAN: Was it a pleasant surprise when you read the script for SWAY to see Russ delving into Thursday’s backstory or were scenes such as these – providing an opportunity for you to move away from the detective mystery aspects and focus on something more character-driven that you could sink your teeth into and stretch your muscles emotionally – something that you were specifically asking for?

ROGER: I think Russ and I were always looking for things from Fred’s past that could be of use. Often they might just be things for me to think about as an actor. Sometimes they’d be part of the story as in SWAY, or when I suddenly spoke some German in ROCKET – that was a bit of a shock. Contrast and elements that weren’t just procedural were always welcome. 

DAMIAN: And was the ballroom dancing in series 5 a pleasant surprise or something of a shock?

ROGER: Indeed it was. I laboured mightily to not look like a sack of potatoes.

COLOURS

DAMIAN: Russ once joked to me that he has two notes up on his wall in the room where he writes. One reads ‘Television is a collaborative medium’ and the other, ‘Collaborators will be shot’. Seriously though, do you feel as though you were welcome to collaborate in terms of Thursday and perhaps give me an example of any aspects of the character development over the years that you felt particularly strong about?

ROGER: Collaboration and suggestions were always welcome and I hope useful. Sometime in the middle of our run I remember a conversation with Russ about where we should go with Fred. I said that the family had been everything to him and the foundation of his life and happiness so what needed to happen was for it to be taken away from him. Which is kind of what happened for a while until fences were mended. Of course a version of that happens with every family as children grow up and leave home.

DAMIAN: The end of Endeavour is obviously something that’s been seriously discussed a lot in the last few years but what were you personally looking for in the scripts to this final series in order to keep Thursday fresh and interesting to play?

ROGER: A substantial and satisfying enough reason for John Thaw’s Morse never to mention Fred Thursday. 

DAMIAN: From the very beginning, Russ has always maintained that he knew exactly how Endeavour would end. At what point did he share this with you and what was your initial reaction?

ROGER: A couple of years before he produced a storyline that led to the endpoint that we now have. Though the way of getting there has changed somewhat, the end has stayed the same. I thought it was great.

DAMIAN: Why do you feel now is the right time for the show to end?

ROGER: It’s been quite a while hasn’t it? I think we have fully explored the group of regular characters’ relationships and we didn’t want to repeat ourselves. 

DAMIAN: I’ve interviewed all of the regular cast and also a good many members of the crew. Shaun Evans, for example, described you as ‘glorious, funny, and irreverent, and sharp, but most of all one of the most wonderful, coolest actors”. Indeed, everyone has always said such wonderful things about you but I think one of the most revealing quotes was from Sean Rigby who told me that performing with you and Anton Lesser was like a masterclass in acting. What will you miss most about playing Fred Thursday?

ROGER: What I’ll miss most is being on set with and spending time with Shaun, Anton, Sean, Caroline, Sara, Jack, Jimmy, Abigail and all the actors who joined us. Inevitably Shaun most of all as we have collaborated so closely and for so long. He is the best of men and the finest of actors and directors. 

DAMIAN: Have you kept the fedora?

ROGER: No. What would I do with it? I couldn’t wear it! I’ve always loved it, it is a Dunn and Co hat – not a fedora, I think,  what is it? A trilby? – as is the coat I always wore. Perfect for Fred and for the period when there was a Dunn and Co Gentleman’s outfitters in every town more or less. Tragically, after the first series, it was stored badly and got crushed, so I had to go to the wonderful Lock and Co in St. James and get a beautiful and very expensive replacement which I wore for the following series. The series after that, the designer had found the old hat and had a lot of repair work done on it to remove the crush mark. I think she wanted the old hat back. She gave me the choice and we looked at them in the mirror. The Dunn and Co was simply more Fred than the beautiful elegant Lock and Co. so we went back to it. However, I searched out the Lock and Co during the final series and the designer found it. It has become mine. I have nearly worn it twice and will do so at some stage, but the problem with hats, as I discovered over all those years, is where do you put them? Aside from on your head? 

DAMIAN: And just one final question please – I keep asking Russ but he never tells me – what sandwich does Thursday have on Wednesdays?

ROGER: No idea, I’m afraid. 

DAMIAN: Roger, thank you very much indeed. You’re one of our very finest actors and with you wearing the hat, Detective Chief Inspector Fred Thursday has become every bit as iconic as Morse or any other character in a classic detective drama. Very best wishes for the future and, of course, mind how you go.

ROGER: I will try to Damian, and mind how you go.

~

Interview copyright © Damian Michael Barcroft 2023

~

THE ENDEAVOUR INTERVIEWS 2023: ANTON LESSER

Interview copyright © Damian Michael Barcroft 2023

~ An exclusive Endeavour interview with Anton Lesser ~

DAMIAN: Now, a couple of things first, I received an email from Kate Saxon [Director] this morning and she asked me to tell you that she sends her love.

ANTON: Aww, brilliant, thank you.

DAMIAN: This interview we’re doing now will be posted after the first two episodes have gone out but before the final so I’ve checked with Russ and it’s OK to talk a little bit about Bright’s days at Castle Gate sadly drawing to a close which will obviously set much of the tone for the last series. Russ mentioned though, that Bright being Bright, he’s determined to see all his chicks are taken care of.

ANTON: Yes, that’s right.

DAMIAN: So, we’ll talk about the first couple of episodes but no spoilers for the last.

ANTON: Yes, of course, I’ll do my best to remember and not let the cat out of the bag.

Harold Macmillan in The Crown
Qyburn in Game of Thrones

DAMIAN: In our first interview, I mentioned that in addition to your impressive body of work – both in the theatre and on the screen – you just happened to be in two of the biggest TV shows on the planet with The Crown and Game of Thrones. But now, you’re also in one of the biggest shows in the galaxy! Tell me how you came to be cast in Star Wars: Andor?

ANTON: Yes, well, funnily enough, a couple of years ago, I got a day’s work on Rogue One [a prequel to the original 1977 Star Wars film, A New Hope, and Star Wars: Andor is itself a prequel to Rogue One] just as a security guard. It was hardly a part at all really, but it was just fun to be on it. And, subsequently, the part got cut. There were a lot of English actors who were called in to do an appearance and then it got cut. Which often happens so that was fine. But then, that turned out to be really fortunate because if it hadn’t been cut, I wouldn’t have been able to be in Andor.

So, it worked out brilliantly. I did a self tape [filmed audition] for this thing that Disney were doing – I didn’t know what it was because it’s all so secret and you didn’t get a script, just a little sort of compilation of lines, that could be any character really, he was like a generic sort of thing just to see if you would be suitable for that kind of age group of characters – so I did that and then didn’t think any more about it. Then six weeks or so later, my agent told me they’re offering you the part and I asked what it was and he still didn’t know! It took me ages to find out it was indeed Star Wars so it was fantastic. And, it’s been brilliant because the writer of it is Tony Gilroy who directed and wrote some of The Bourne Identity films – he’s absolutely brilliant so I was just thrilled to be in it and meet him and be part of it. Yeah, it was great.

Star Wars: Andor

DAMIAN: In the original Star Wars, Mark Hamill, Harrison Ford and Carrie Fisher were all relatively unknown and so the film needed the experience and gravitas of acting legends such as Alec Guinness and Peter Cushing.

ANTON: Oh, yes, yes, yes, that’s right.

DAMIAN: And I think that’s why you were cast in this one because they needed that kind of gravitas for this one too.

ANTON: Well, that’s a lovely idea but I don’t know about that – it’s great of you to say though!

DAMIAN: I think what pleases me most is that with things like Game of Thrones and Star Wars in particular, these shows will continue to introduce you to new audiences for generations to come and that really, really makes me happy.

ANTON: Oh, that’s great and yeah, I suppose you’re right. I mean, I’ve started to get invitations to those convention things like Star Wars and Game of Thrones which are very nice actually.

DAMIAN: Are they really?

ANTON: Yes, yes. People are so grateful that you turn up so they are actually rather nice things to do. I was completely overwhelmed by how thrilled they are to meet you and they are very caring about the characters.

DAMIAN: I was disappointed that you didn’t get your own lightsaber though.

ANTON: Yes, I know.

DAMIAN: Because you would have done sword fighting training at RADA.

ANTON: Well, yes I did, but I’m too old now.

Peter Cushing in the original 1977 Star Wars film

DAMIAN: Never too old for lightsabers. Anyway, I think yet again, doesn’t your role as Major Partagaz [the head officer at the Imperial Security Bureau and quite similar to the Cushing role of Grand Moff Tarkin in the original] show why casting directors choose you to play such regal and powerful figures of authority?

ANTON: Well, yes, now I’m getting older I seem to get those sorts of parts. I also get lots of rabbis, doctors and barristers. But, I just feel really lucky that over the years, I’ve had such a lovely range of characters and recently – I don’t know if you’ve seen this series Better that’s on? – it stars Leila Farzad and I’ve got a part in that which again is another different kind of role and I just loved it.

Vernon in Better

DAMIAN: I’ve not caught up with it yet but I saw a publicity still with you drinking, smoking and looking rather worse for wear.

ANTON: Yes, he’s a rough looking character.

DAMIAN: Quite different to Bright.

ANTON: Yes, a little bit different to Reggie.

DAMIAN: You mentioned playing doctors and I remember that, even though you only appeared twice in Ripper Street and Dr. Karl Crabbe was such an evil character – you provided him with such a multilayered complexity that he became almost a tragic figure with more of an element of pathos rather than simply being a villain. How do you manage to touch an audience so that they recognise their own flawed humanity in someone so inhumane?

ANTON: I love trying to find their complexity, to use your word, in characters because it’s near the truth of how we are as human beings. We’re not one thing or the other, none of us are, we’re all a mixture of the dark and the light.

Dr. Karl Crabbe in Ripper Street

But I loved doing that job in particular, because Matthew Macfadyen is pretty much my favourite actor. I love his work. It’s so based in truth and honesty. I believe everything and even in stuff like Succession, oh my goodness Damian, he’s fantastic in that – absolutely fantastic.

DAMIAN: It was the BAFTAs recently and I remember you were nominated in the TV best supporting actor category for Wolf Hall, which I know you consider to be one of your favourite roles. The ceremonies are so long and I wondered if it was nerve wracking to be sat there all that time waiting to see if you’ll win?

ANTON: I remember thinking, wow, that’s amazing, my goodness, what an honour to be nominated and it’s actually possible that I could win. But then the other side is, God I hope I don’t win because I’d have to make a speech. So, it’s a mixture; you’re sort of excited and feel flattered that you’re in that company but then you’re sort of thinking, ‘Oh God, what would I say?’ and I remember when they announced the results, feeling this incredible sense of relief.

Thomas More in Wolf Hall

DAMIAN: What was it like returning to the theatre again and reprising your role in The Two Popes?

ANTON: Oh, it was great. I mean you know I did it before in 2019 [discussed in our previous interview], and there was all sorts of talk at the time of it going to the West End and it didn’t happen because of Covid and all that stuff. So, around about the beginning of last year, I got a call from James Baker [director] asking how would I feel about doing a little tour of it, and again, there’s two voices inside my head: one went ‘Ooh, yeah’, and the other one went, ‘Oh dear, I’m too old.’ So I asked what sort of a length of tour and he said, ‘Well, we’re looking at about ten weeks’ and I thought, ‘No, no way.’

The Two Popes

When I was a young actor, I would have jumped to do it but then he asked if I would consider it if it was shorter and then I told him I might consider a maximum of six weeks if Nic Woodeson – who played the other pope – is interested. So I called Nic and I asked him what he thought and he agreed, ‘Ooh, I’m getting too old.’ Anyway, we hummed and harred about it but they came up with a package that made us really comfortable with nice places to stay within walking distance of each theatre and basically just pampered us.

DAMIAN: Now, although, as I’ve said, I’m absolutely thrilled that you’re so busy with other projects, it’s a somewhat bittersweet feeling because hasn’t it meant that unfortunately your availability for Endeavour was a little restricted for the previous series and also this last one?

ANTON: It was a bit, yeah. A bit tight. But they were lovely. We did have a dodging moment when we were a bit sort of double-booked with whatever else I was doing. I can’t remember if it was Andor or something but there was a bit of an overlap and Mammoth [Screen, the production company] had to sort of rejig. Charlotte Webber – who’s a brilliant producer – went out of her way to absolutely rejig their shooting schedule so I could do it and I’m very grateful for that.

Mr and Mrs Bright in series 7

DAMIAN: Obviously the death of Bright’s wife had a huge impact on him but we weren’t able to discuss this in much detail in our last interview because that episode hadn’t gone out at that point. However, much to my surprise and almost disbelief – I remember you telling me that you said to the director that you didn’t know how to play the scene. Now, I asked Kate Saxon about this and she had the following to say:

“[Anton is] the most exquisite and truthful actor. He handled that moment brilliantly. Anton is quite right when he said he didn’t know how to play it: he was open about that with me, as he says in your interview. That was because Bright is quite a closed book in terms of his emotional life, so Anton queried whether he should bat the truth of it away – almost be angry at the revelation at first. I suggested that rather than do that, he just allow Bright to try to listen to what he was being told… to truly hear it, whilst being aware this would be extraordinary news to hear, and therefore difficult to take in. That rather than battle it, he could try to comprehend it. And I did tell him he absolutely knew how to do that. Because Anton is one of the most emotionally open and brave actors I’ve ever worked with. So much so, he’s like the lightest touchpaper – utterly responsive. You’d never want to give a generalised or ill-thought-through note to Anton. If you earn his trust, he’ll take whatever suggestions you offer him. Therefore, as a director, your suggestions really count, so they’ve got to be good! 

ANTON: Aww, that’s lovely. Oh, bless her.

DAMIAN: Given you’re one of our finest actors with a vast amount of experience, can you tell me exactly why you found it so difficult at first and how with Kate’s help, you found the courage to be in the moment and just let yourself open up?

ANTON: I’ve no idea. I was just very, very fortunate that it was Kate who allowed the space and the time in the context of a piece of work where they don’t usually give you much time. It’s not like you’re on a movie where you’ve got time to rehearse, and do fifteen takes and then you go away and come back and do it again in the afternoon and if it doesn’t work you can come in again and do it the next day. This was more like you’ve half an hour to forty minutes and then you have to move onto the next scene because of the budget.

Given those constraints, there are some directors who – it’s almost magical, it’s a mysterious thing – that people can give you the space and the confidence to step into areas that perhaps you normally wouldn’t so I’m really saying I think I was just very lucky it was her and not somebody else saying, ‘OK, we’ve got to get this in, so just go for it.’ The chemistry was good, but other than that, that’s all I can say. It’s a whole mystery, this business of acting.

ZENANA

DAMIAN: So not only did Bright lose his young daughter but now also his wife too and he is completely alone. Prior to the events of the final series, what do you think drove Bright to get up in the morning and continue to go to work?

ANTON: That’s a good question but again, I don’t know. What keeps anybody going when they receive a big emotional blow? Some people, I suppose, don’t. Some people succumb and put the pillow over their head and convince themselves they’re not up to the challenge of dealing with it. But, I think perhaps it is a number of things as always, a sort of cocktail of things. One of which was clearly his training and his commitment and loyalty to those people who as Russell says, are ‘his chicks’, his boys, and we get to see that very powerfully in this last series.

I won’t go into too much detail but you do get a sense that he has the rigour and almost the very thing that from one perspective makes him rigid, and over sort of disciplinarian as he was at the beginning, a rather overstrict martinet sort of character whose negative ways also prove to be the things that sustains him at a time when he needs help. So I think that’s certainly one element to his sense of responsibility. Another, is the things that he’s come through in his many years dealing with people and situations; probably all sorts of grim and challenging situations. We know about the tiger don’t we?

DAMIAN: Oh, yes.

PREY

ANTON: And how he dealt with things like that, so just a mixture of things. Not really one clear answer but the fact that it’s a mixture and the fact that he’s complex, again going back to that thing that makes him real. And, he could have easily, if Russell had decided, he could have easily gone the other way and we’d have seen a complex character who went down a different path but I think it’s more exciting that his journey has come, you know, right from the beginning when he started off as this really sort of strict and rather unpleasant character but he turns out to be much more complicated and human.

DAMIAN: Yes, there was a lovely scene in the last series (TERMINUS) where it is snowing and Thursday is at the police station after learning that his son has gone missing from the army and Bright chooses to stay with him. You know, I didn’t want the scene to end and would have been happy just to have listened to Bright and Thursday talking together for the rest of the episode.

ANTON: I feel the same and that’s why, over the years, I’ve been sad that so many of the scenes that we actually shot never made it because of time. Such a shame.

DAMIAN: Another beautiful scene that I liked in the previous series was with Bright painting at the art classes (SCHERZO). 

ANTON: Yes, that was nice.

SCHERZO

DAMIAN: As was the case with Shirley Trewlove previously, Bright is once again able to not only relate to young women, but also reach out and comfort them. I was very moved when he told the model, Lynn Parry, that ‘I think you’re an intelligent, sensitive young woman who fell amongst scoundrels. Any shame is on their side. Not yours.’ and then she kisses him on the cheek and says ‘Thank you’. Is it his own vulnerabilities that make Bright so accessible and relatable?

ANTON: Certainly as he’s gone on, as he’s developed those attributes. Yes, they’ve come out more and more.

PREY

DAMIAN: I remember you telling me before and we’ve already mentioned the tiger, that that was one of your favourite scenes but I’m wondering, looking back on all the episodes now, do you have a favourite scene or an episode that you think provided the audience with a window intro Bright’s soul?

ANTON: Oh, definitely I think my favourite, and the most challenging, was the one that we’ve discussed when Kate helped me to have a truthful response to that moment when he discovers his wife has died. And, I also love that whole bit with the doctor, do you remember when he goes to the club?

DAMIAN: Oh, yes, with Max? Yes, that was one of my favourites too where he asks him for help.

CONFECTION

ANTON: I loved that because Bright was out of uniform and he was just a bloke. Just a civilian, both visually and psychologically. He wasn’t in a position of authority; he was visiting someone else in their comfort zone. In their environment and asking for their help. I just loved that we saw that different perspective.

DAMIAN: Given that this is the end, and the final chance for the actors to find the emotional truths about their characters, do you think there was more of a pressure to get them nailed one last time – particularly when scenes are not often shot in chronological order and there is limited time to rehearse?

ANTON: Absolutely. We were all so aware that this really was the end. Because, I think for quite a few years, people go round and say, ‘Oh, this is going to be the last season’, and then it turned out not to be, that when it was really clear that this really was the end, there was a real desire – I’m sure on everybody’s part – but certainly mine, that you wanted to ring out the juice of it, every possible minute to fulfil the potential of what you’ve been involved with for so long. I haven’t seen the finished thing, but I’ve seen little bits of it when I’ve had to do ADR, you know?

DAMIAN: Additional dialogue recording?

ANTON: Yes, and I thought, ‘Oh, gosh, that’s still there’, and I’m just delighted by the emotional culmination of Bright which I think Russell has written absolutely beautifully for all of the characters – not just mine.

I was saying to Kate, there’s a bit that I can’t tell you about that I loved so much when we shot it. When I read it, I was really moved actually, but I thought, ‘Wow, this is really beautiful, but it’s not going to survive the cut’ and I said to Kate, ‘this isn’t going to be in’, and she said, ‘It will if I have anything to do with it – I’m going to fight for it.’ And then I spoke to Russell and told him I love what you’ve written for all the characters at the end but particularly mine and I was so happy but it’ll be cut and he just said, ‘Over my dead body.’ As far as I know it’s still there.

DAMIAN: Well, I certainly hope so. Now, I remember before when I asked you about your approach to acting and you described it so beautifully by saying it’s not so much acting as revealing and describing it as the difference between a hand being closed or a hand relaxing and opening – being brave enough to be open enough that it allows the audience to identify with the character. Do you think you were able to do this one last time as Bright?

ANTON: I hope so. I really hope so. That was certainly my intention. I’m greedy though. You know, whatever was given to me, I always wanted more opportunities. I always wish they hadn’t cut that scene or I wish they hadn’t edited that little moment. Sometimes I question editing but it’s a selfish perspective. You have got to realise that the editor is working with so many strands, it’s not just you so I try to be generous in that aspect.

DAMIAN: Can you tell me what the last day on set was like and was it emotional saying goodbye to a cast and crew that you’ve worked with for the best part of a decade?

ANTON: It was. It was very emotional. I mean, because they were having to shoot all my stuff and get me away to do my other things, I wasn’t there the very last day of shooting so they put my stuff four or five days from the end. I can’t quite remember but what was very lovely as they started shooting my last scene – and again it wasn’t chronologically his last – people started to appear in the studio; the producers would appear, and other people, and actors from another day’s work, and they all congregated and when they shot my last one, there was all these people and they all applauded and it was just lovely.

I think I responded – because I didn’t know what to say – I think I responded with some words of Reggie Bright which appear in the last episode. I can’t tell you about it but you’ll probably recognise what I said when you see it.

DAMIAN: You’ve never played the same character over such a long period. Do you think you’ll miss Bright?

ANTON: No. I’ll miss the lovely familiarity, and the lovely sort of family aspect of going there every year for the last ten years and just immediately clicking in that sort of ease of working and knowing the other people and their characters. That is lovely. You know, they all came to see The Two Popes in Kingston upon Thames. Kate came and that was absolutely thrilling and I went down after the show and they all were in the bar and they were all hugging me and saying lovely things. It was just like, yeah, your family are there supporting you. It was just really nice, but Bright? No, I won’t miss Bright because he’s come and had that journey through me and that’s it, I’m fine and happy about that. We’ve seen his journey and I hope it’s served its purpose well.

DAMIAN: If Bright was a real person that you’d met and someone asked you to describe him, what would you say about him?

ANTON: Oh, God, erm…

DAMIAN: Well, what would your first impression of him be?

ANTON: Mixed very mixed.

DAMIAN: Well, he has been a mixed character if you look back at his journey from the first episode.

GIRL

ANTON: Yes, I think like most of us with the best intentions in the world, sometimes he pursued those intentions for all the right motives and maybe in a misguided way, as we all do, but ultimately a man as we all are, worthy of respect because he was doing his best given the forces he was exposed to; the natural forces and the natural conditions we all have to face. He did the very best he could, sometimes it didn’t work, sometimes it did, but deserving of dignity and respect as a human being. I just think he’s a ripe old mixture.

DAMIAN: You know I’m a huge fan of yours and whenever I watch and inevitably rewatch Endeavour, I’ll always remember these conversations we’ve had over the years with great fondness. Anton, thank you so very much.

ANTON: Aww, that’s very kind of you to say, Damian. I’ve enjoyed them, I really have.

~

Interview copyright © Damian Michael Barcroft 2023

THE ENDEAVOUR INTERVIEWS 2023: RUSSELL LEWIS PART II

Interview copyright © Damian Michael Barcroft 2023

Looking back at his early interests as a boy, it might be easy to see how he got to be one of our country’s very finest television writers working in the detective and murder mystery genre. You know, I’ve always tried to be reasonably objective but having had the immense privilege of interviewing Russell Lewis so many times over the last decade, you may suspect that I’m guilty of a little bias and, of course, I confess that you may well be right – how could I not be after witnessing the inner workings of such a brilliant, cunning and dexterous mind firsthand and for so long?

Therefore, please don’t just take my word for it because I’ll always remember that his friend and close collaborator in crime, Damien Timmer, once told me that even before he met Russ for the first time, he knew that he had ‘the Midas Touch’ and that he was a ‘powerhouse of ideas and everyone adored him.’ Indeed, he continued: ‘Nothing else reads like a Russell script – the hugely evocative stage directions, the hinterland he gives all his characters, the way he combines real erudition with great populist story instincts, and his genius for plotting.’ So, there you are, like myself and everyone else who has had the pleasure of meeting him in person, even managing directors of hugely successful television production companies like Mr. Timmer confesses to being ‘a very starstruck fan.’

At the time though – looking back once more to somewhere around the early seventies and aged about nine or so – young Lewis must have seemed like a strange little fellow indeed to be wandering around WH Smith’s for hours on end enthralled by the Fontana editions of Agatha Christie with sensationally lurid covers by Tom Adams. On other occasions, he and his tutor would each take turns in reading aloud pages from Christie classics which surely gave him the shudders at such a young age but, crucially, also fired and furnished his immeasurable imagination.

A little later, hunting and tracking them down in charity shops and jumble sales, Russ would buy the books as gifts for himself that he has added to a collection built up over the years which he cherishes and still draws inspiration from to this very day. And, it is today that we receive one of our final gifts from Russ – the penultimate episode of Endeavour. However, just before we start the unwrapping, let’s first see what we can find as we have another rummage through that aforementioned brilliant, cunning and dexterous mind of his…

Confessions of a Scriptwriter

or, His Last Willing Testicle

~ An exclusive Endeavour interview with Russell Lewis ~

‘Looking for absolution?’
‘It’s too late for me. I’m past saving.’

‘I’ve conducted some odd interviews in my time, matey. But stone me, this morning’s go takes the Garibaldi.’ – DS Jim Strange (SCHERZO)

DAMIAN: SCHERZO (S8:E2) opens at Cowley East Train Station where a taxi driver takes a young couple – Mr. and Mrs. Appleby – to Paradise Court, a nudist camp. Along the way, we see another taxi driver pull up alongside a woman who is learning to drive with the NOGLEA school of motoring. Waiting at a set of traffic lights, she sensually touches up her lipstick as her instructor looks on somewhat bemused while Brian – the aforementioned second taxi driver also waiting at the lights – shows his approval with lewd, flirtatious facial gestures and by over-revving his car engine. Unimpressed by his desperate display of machismo, she speeds off as soon as the light turns green and almost knocks Lee Timothy, a window cleaner, off his bicycle…

Although your casual allusions to the pop culture of the period have been a constant in Endeavour from the very beginning – Confessions of a Window Cleaner (1974), Confessions of a Driving Instructor (1976) and Carry On Camping (1969) in this particular scene – it’s the fact that this opening has the general tone of a seventies sex comedy that some viewers may have found a little jarring.

Russ, you’ve given us many unusual gifts over the years ranging from unexpected stocking fillers such as all singing and dancing musical numbers, puppets and even a certain tiger! – some were more welcome than others but it’s always the thought that counts. Nevertheless, what’s going on with this opener to SCHERZO and is your Dark Passenger on the right pills?

RUSS: It arose from research, really. I’d got hold of a few magazines from the year in question that I’d remembered from boyhood – Titbits and Weekend, and, of course, Reveille – and really, they’re quite extraordinary. Titbits, especially. On one level – kind of Dick Emery hilarious, and on another – certainly to modern sensibilities – quite, in the mot de nos jours  ‘problematic’. There’s one front page in particular of a kind of driving lesson or driving test scenario. I think the pitch is about that staple of club comics of the time – ‘Women Drivers’. But it’s illustrated with a very, and I use the period vernacular, ‘busty’ examinee/learner behind the wheel more or less toppling out of her low cut dress and the examiner/instructor, a middle-aged man in a heavy brown suit, sweating profusely and getting hot under the collar at sight of his examinee/learner’s ‘ample charms.’ It’s just staggering to the modern eye.  

The whole story really came together from that. It seemed to say so much about our relationship to sex then. The whole mag – those parts not concerned with adverts for joining the armed services – pretty much drips with the same kind of queasy furtiveness. It’s seaside postcard/McGill but gone rancid. You can imagine our friend Bob Rusk tutting disapproval in the newsagents at such sauciness on public display. Shame and guilt loom large.

I think there is a distinction to be made. The Confessions series has a comedic charm in a way that a ‘sex’ scene in the On the Buses movie, say, just doesn’t. Most of the time, in the Confessions series, the butt – and I use the term advisedly – of the joke is the scrapes that Timothy Lea gets into. Whereas, Bob Grant’s Jack rolling about on a bed fully clothed with a woman in a negligee, and rolling his eyes in orgasmic delight from having done nothing more than bitten his partner’s bare shoulder before collapsing back ‘spent’ – is just bizarre.

I looked at the Adventures series, too – particularly Barry Evans in Adventures of a Taxi Driver – and that was another piece of the jigsaw. On the one hand – and I grant that we were getting ahead of ourselves so far as the movies were concerned, but given that Confessions of a Window Cleaner was in print, it felt like fair grist to the mill – you had this Weekend/Titbits level of titillation, Benny Hill, Madeleine Smith’s damsel in distress in the Two Rons serial. All good clean family fun, while at the other end of the scale, you had the Dirty Squad in Soho – the Obscene Publications boys – absolutely up to their necks in gangland corruption. All of it made possible through British society’s often frankly gruesome relationship with matters of a sexual nature.

So – on the one level, there’s this almost prim and innocent Health & Efficiency, back to Eden type thing with the nudists – another staple of British comedy at the time – and on another level the wholesale importation of European pornography made possible by the utter corruption of certain departments within the Met, ‘adult’ shops, Soho gangland, and the plastic mac brigade, with the world of Raymond’s Revue Bar somewhere in the middle of that sliding scale. It’s the sensibility of Eric Idle’s character in the ‘Nudge-nudge’ sketch, too.

All of that felt like very fertile ground for a crime story.

DAMIAN: Can you explain your obvious affliction, oops, sorry, I meant affection for both the Carry On and Confessions series and also what you think the films might tell us about the cinema-going audience of the early seventies?

RUSS: I think they’re a pretty reliable barometer of public taste and to a lesser degree mores at any particular time. With Carry Ons that’s easier to see as they cover a much wider timescale. There’s a world of difference between Constable or Sergeant, say, and Emmanuelle. You can probably trace a direct line back to Canterbury Tales insofar as it was a collection of archetypes – actually, much further – back to the Romans and the Greeks with Lysistrata.

As a London and Home Counties boy, I’m especially fond of them for the time machine quality of their location work. And that’s something one finds again with the Confessions and Adventures series. It’s a landscape I recognise and remember. 

DAMIAN: Stone me, Hancock’s Half Hour is another fixation of yours that has cropped up over the years so you must be aware one of those episodes feature reference to films entitled Nudist Paradise and Around the World With Nothing On?

RUSS: We did try to use Lady Don’t Fall Backwards by D’arcy Sarto elsewhere – but just at the time that an ‘actual’ version of it came out in print.  

DAMIAN: There must have been some sniggering whilst filming the scenes at Paradise Court?

RUSS: I wasn’t there, so couldn’t speak to that – but I think it’s unlikely. Such things would be handled as a matter of course with great sensitivity.

DAMIAN: And nevermind facemasks, the extras at the nudist resort were obviously wearing nothing at all! The on set COVID Compliance Officer must have had their sanitised hands full?

RUSS: Phwoaaar!  

DAMIAN: In addition to yourself, I know that both Shaun Evans and Roger Allam have always maintained that you never wanted to repeat yourselves with Endeavour which is admirable. However, I wonder how not wanting to repeat yourself sits with sticking to the formula of what audiences expect from a Sunday night detective drama and do the sort of aforementioned diversions and detours possibly suggest a boredom with the material?

RUSS: I’d hope that my initial explanation would go some way towards shooting that one down. There was a very serious theme underpinning the story. And I like to think all of us treated such a delicate story with the care it warranted. You have to look past the decoration – which often serves to keep the viewer wrong footed – to what’s going on underneath. Distraction is a very potent device in the arsenal of legerdemain. Look at this – don’t look at that. Think about that – don’t think about this.

DAMIAN: I suppose another more generous way of looking at this is that these sort of shenanigans – while they would never have occurred in either Inspector Morse or Lewis – prove that your take on Colin Dexter’s Oxford is much more flexible which is why – in my humble opinion, at least – this is just one of the reasons why Endeavour has surpassed both of its predecessors. What are your thoughts on this?

RUSS: Well – I think they’re three very different shows, made at different times. I don’t think one can fairly compare them. Without Morse, no Lewis, and without either of those there’s no Endeavour. So, though it’s very generous of you to say so, in all conscience I couldn’t concur. Pick a favourite child. I genuinely don’t think any of us involved have ever thought of it in those terms.  

But to your point about where each series could go. I’d probably point to Cherubim as atypical. Promised Land also went outside the expected ‘safe operating procedure’. Triumphantly, I’m my view. And Lewis could go out there. Tonally – there’s always been room in Endeavour for us to have a little bit more humour – both light and dark.

With regard to the case in point. Don’t forget that the Morse of the novels was not averse to flicking through the pages of top-shelf, monodextrous literature. In fact, I’m sure there’s a reference in one of the books to his greatest shame being caught perusing the same in the local newsagents by a couple of uniform coppers.

DAMIAN: Of course, as I’ve said to you before, another reason that I believe Endeavour is by far the best of the three screen adaptations of Dexter’s work is that there is far more focus on developing the characters and we have an two excellent examples of this in this film with Endeavour and his stepmother and also Joan and Strange which we’ll discuss first.

Having agreed to be his dinner date in the previous film, Strange arrives at Joan’s flat dressed in a tuxedo and carrying a bunch of flowers for her. He nervously straightens his jacket before ringing the doorbell and when he finally does, Joan appears in her dress and Strange can’t help but stare in wonder. Later, at the Masonic Lodge, they have a lovely time and dance together while the band performs “Earth Angel” which ends with the lyrics, ‘A fool in love’ as we cut to Endeavour staggering around drunk before getting knocked over by a taxi – the irony!

Additionally, in the final scene of SCHERZO, Endeavour says, ‘Well, I’m not the fool I was’ to which Thursday replies, ‘I quite liked that fool. He hoped for the best in people.’ Now, perhaps we’d better move along faster than a DMC-12 with a flux capacitor, but will you tell me who the fool in love is at this particular moment in time?

RUSS: We’ve been very lucky to be able to put the stories out in an order – a luxury denied to Morse and Lewis – but one, I think, due to the changing times. Going back right to the start, I’d picked up on things as a viewer that suggested ongoing story and greater character development was something in which the modern audience was more invested than at the time of either of the preceding shows.

Who the fool in love is? All of us, probably – at one time or another.

DAMIAN: Why did Endeavour go to see Joan at her flat and having discovered she was out with some bloke in an evening suit, not leave a message?

RUSS: Whatever he might’ve had to say died on his tongue when he learned she was out with someone else.

DAMIAN: It would have been amusing if the taxi that hit Endeavour was the same one taking Strange and Joan home.

RUSS: I like coincidence as much as the next man, but that one might have got me drummed out of the academy. Coincidence has always been a hard sell with Mr. E.

DAMIAN: As Joan is dropped off at her flat, she kisses Strange on the cheek and he says, ‘Blimey, I won’t wash my face for a week now.’ This was a scene with the exact same dialogue that was cut from a script from many series ago and isn’t it funny to recall that Endeavour, Strange and two girls – one of which was Joan – all went on a double date in NOCTURNE (S2:E2).

You once told me that you knew Joan and Endeavour would fall for each other the moment she first opened the front door to him in FUGUE (S1:E2), but at what point did you have the idea for Joan and Strange to become romantically involved with each other?

RUSS: Perhaps unwise to get ahead of ourselves, but the possibility would have existed from the off. Rather like the Big Bang. Planck time – which is nothing to do with Eric Sykes. So closely do things come into being, that it’s almost impossible to offer a reliable breakdown of when which elements arrived in which order but I remember talking about it at an early readthrough. 

DAMIAN: Let’s now take a look at when Gwen unexpectedly comes to stay with Endeavour…

ENDEAVOUR: There’s more to the world than you find in Reveille, Gwen.

GWEN: And you’d know all about it, I’m sure. Because you went to Oxford. But you didn’t finish it, though, did you? For all your books and your poetry and your snooty music, you failed.

ENDEAVOUR: Yep! I failed. I should have stayed at home and drove a taxi, like my father. And then got one of the local girls knocked up. Then you could look down your nose at me, and all would be well in your tiny, little world.

GWEN: You were always a strange one. Close and private. Filled with your sweaty, little secrets. You were a disappointment to him.

ENDEAVOUR: So you said.

GWEN: A big disappointment.

ENDEAVOUR: So you said.

GWEN: I didn’t kill her!

ENDEAVOUR: What?

GWEN: I didn’t give her cancer. And you can’t blame me all your life.

ENDEAVOUR: I’ve got work to do. Goodnight, Gwen.

GWEN: We took you in.

DAMIAN: Stunning scene. Now, you’ll have to forgive me as I get increasingly confused between the novels, original series and also the various different drafts of Endeavour scripts that I’ve read over the years together with ideas that you’ve told me about but never actually made it to the screen, but isn’t there quite a bit of original detail in this film regarding the family not found elsewhere that you’ve personally added to the Morse mythology?

RUSS: Perhaps. It’s one interpretation of the information available. There are things not covered in the novels or the TV show that give one some leeway. And Endeavour’s account of the imaginary life Gwen would have liked for him contains a bit of a pot shot at Gwen herself – having been a local girl. Had Morse père got her knocked up? But it sort of also speaks to the veneer of respectability that some people want to claim for themselves by mere dint of being a generation removed. Hence her being able to look down her nose at Endeavour – at least as he imagines she would – for essentially replicating his father’s behaviour.

It’s quite knotty – psychologically. 

DAMIAN: I know that you originally wrote an entire speech for HOME (S1:E4) in which Endeavour lays bare his soul – including describing his feeling at having lost Susan, he asks, ‘Is that how it was for you?’ – but is only able to communicate his emotions to his father while he was comatose and obviously not able to respond which ended up being cut at the request of both Shaun Evans and the director.

Maybe not every question gets an answer, but I’m not entirely sure what the relationship was between Cyril and Gwen – were they actually happy together or did he never really stop loving Endeavour’s mother?

RUSS: We’re into quite treacherous ground here. Potentially. It’s something to do with generation and class, and the prevailing ‘What will the neighbours say?’ morality of the time. A sense that Cyril had made his bed – quite literally – and had now better lie in it.

Having had a strained relationship with Cyril, for my money, right at the end, Endeavour desperately needed that question answered. He needed to know if it was something he shared with his father – that he was still in love with a woman who had slipped forever beyond his reach. If I remember, he never got his answer because the only time he could ask the question was when Cyril was too far gone to reply.

Endeavour needed to know if he and Cyril were the same. If they were both cursed.

I think the damaged child, the romantic in Endeavour, very likely hung on to the notion that Cyril still loved his mother in some way. It’s a sort of arrested emotional development. The child who hopes that Mummy and Daddy will somehow get back together again, and the prelapsarian idyll will be restored. Things appear to be a lot healthier nowadays, so far as societal shame and guilt are concerned – with, I think, the data suggesting that children growing up with both birth parents living together is now the minority.  

But then – and I can only speak to the early 60s and 70s – so one must multiply that by an order of magnitude for the 40s/early 50s when Cyril and Endeavour’s mum went their separate ways – the social stigma then around divorce was unimaginable. For Endeavour, it would have been whispers in the playground – looks and nods in the street. A certain pursed-lips reserve in the butchers when he went shopping with his mother – as if people feared contagion. Divorce. Unmarried pregnancy. Two sides of the same coin. The fear of being found wanting and becoming an outcast from the tribe. People moved away. They left one part of the country for another to escape the disapproval and stigma. But it’s about class. And the fear of ruin. Poor Fanny Robin in Far From the Madding Crowd. It goes back to Thursday’s quotation of the old song, “She Was Poor But She Was Honest” – ‘It’s the same the whole world over, it’s the poor what gets the blame, it’s the rich what gets the pleasure, ain’t it all a bloomin’ shame.’

Whatever Cyril’s feelings, I imagine any regrets he may have had were turned into an inescapable sense of guilt by her death. There was nothing then that he could ever put right. They never got to a place of forgiveness and acceptance of changed circumstances. And, of course, that brought Endeavour full time into their lives. Gwen, forever the scarlet woman who could never live up to his sainted mother. It’s a Wednesday Play, really – isn’t it?

I don’t think it was a madly happy house.

DAMIAN: Father and son relationships can be difficult at the best of times but did Cyril love Endeavour and was he actually disappointed with his son or is Gwen just trying to hurt him?

RUSS: Endeavour was an inescapable daily reminder of what had been. A living rebuke – whether the rebuke was intended or not. I think everything between them was coloured by that.

DAMIAN: Endeavour clearly misses his mother most but to what extent does he love his father and stepmother?

RUSS: It’s a mess, isn’t it? I suspect he doesn’t know what he’s expected to feel, and consequently feels very little. Ambivalence. Perhaps there comes a point for some children who aren’t gaining whatever emotional nourishment or attention they need from a parent, that they simply stop trying to gain the thing which is being withheld. They withdraw from engagement and fall back upon self-reliance.

And you thought this story was just a bit of salacious titty-bum-bum fluff!

DAMIAN: Me, Sir? Never! Anyway, after finding little Mark Lunn – with the gun – at the murder site of the boy’s father, Endeavour tells him: ‘Your mum and dad getting divorced had nothing to do with anything that you said or did, or didn’t do or say. Do you understand?’ Not only did they both have divorced and now deceased taxi drivers as fathers, when the scene ends with Endeavour telling little Lunn with the gun to ‘Go in and give your mum a hug. Tell her you love her.’, doesn’t he seem to be thinking aloud as much as actually talking to the boy?

RUSS: He’s always trying to fix the past in the present.

DAMIAN: Another scene that beautifully touches on the theme of difficult relationships between fathers and their children is between Bright and the life model in the art class, Lynn Parry, who also appeared in Blue Movies and turns out to be the daughter of the killer in this film:

LYNN: Dad? What does that even mean? I barely remember him.

BRIGHT: Perhaps. But he never forgot you.

LYNN: Well, maybe it would have been better for everyone if he had.

BRIGHT: Something far easier said than done for any father.

LYNN: What can you think of me?

BRIGHT: I think you’re an intelligent, sensitive, young woman who fell amongst scoundrels. Any shame is on their side. Not yours.

Lynn then kisses him softly on the cheek and thanks him. As was the case between Bright and Shirley Trewlove, he once again seems able to relate particularly well with young women and gain their trust and confidence. Surely, this can’t just be put down to the fact that he simply lost his own daughter?

RUSS: Perhaps every young woman of a certain age he sees could have been Dulcie. I think that’s the thing. So he treads gently.  

DAMIAN: Since when did Bright paint?

RUSS: Before life and parental disapproval stamped that particular dream into the dirt.

DAMIAN: Had a life model in the art class posed nude, Bright wouldn’t have painted them would he?

RUSS: I think, with the bereavement, he’s rediscovered a part of himself he’d forgotten about. I don’t know if it made the cut – thinking about it, I’m almost certain that it didn’t – but there was a scene, I think in FILM 1, which was culled for budgetary/scheduling reasons – you’ll find the one usually feeds into the other – where Bright finds his old painting kit in the wardrobe while clearing out Mrs. Bright’s old clothes. We covered it off in dialogue, but the optimal iteration would have been to see that moment with Anton.

It’s always difficult to get everything – but those little vignettes which say so much with so little are often casualties. It does make you want to kick the office apart, because you’ve taken great pains to lay the groundwork with a deal of subtlety – and all that careful crafting so often goes for naught, and consequently folk think you’ve just been slipshod on the page or in the plotting. Show show show not tell. But – them’s the breaks. You have to grow a fairly chitinous carapace.

So – yes, I think he probably would have painted a nude life model. Which is sort of what the story was exploring. If you put quote marks around a thing and call it “Art” – it’s perfectly acceptable. Rather like those who might stand too close to The Flying Scotsman – smut is in the eye of the beholder. While at the other end of the scale, you’ve got the criminality that surrounds Dinner For Three.  

Originally, the story was a much more Golden Age puzzle, which really played into the (spoiler alert) clock hands code. And the finale all played out at the location where Dinner For Three was filmed. A much bigger denouement, which at one stage involved Lynn being brought to the location, and the killer being confronted with her. But very late in the shooting schedule there was a lot of pushback. As I’ve mentioned previously – over the years the boys have been less disposed to the grand-standing reveal of the intricately plotted solution to the mystery, and this was a good late example of that.  

So – the request was to simplify the puzzle wholesale, and reduce the semaphore/Signals aspect hugely, and also – for reasons I was never quite able to fathom – not to do it at the location. One’s obliged to make such requests work, and you certainly throw the kitchen sink at solving the problem to everyone’s satisfaction, typically against the unforgiving minute, but as the designer of an already airworthy craft, whether the product of the redrawn blueprint lands safely or not, you can always hear what – if only to your ears – will forever be a squeaky wheel.

DAMIAN: I’ve highlighted a couple of instances in the past where I believed art was imitating life but you almost always dismiss them as coincidence. However, we learn that during the war – when a man kept asking if he could measure her feet! – Win Thursday was in Blackpool with the Auxiliary Territorial Service and, of course, Caroline O’Neill was born and lived in Blackpool for some time and also in this film, when Strange says that, ‘I’ve conducted some odd interviews in my time, matey. But stone me, this morning’s go takes the Garibaldi’, I know for a fact – because Sean Rigby told me so himself years ago – that the Garibaldi is his favourite biscuit. Well?

RUSS: I genuinely didn’t know that about Riggers. Garibaldi is just a standard comedy biscuit. It probably owes more to the great Alexei Sayle. And I don’t think I knew that about Caro. However, the ‘measure your feet’ thing was perfectly true. It happened to a close member of my family at about this time.  

DAMIAN: Although I won’t be asking what size shoes you wear, I would be curious to learn what your favourite biscuit might be?

RUSS: At risk of sounding like EL Wisty, shoe sizes are really quite interesting from a whodunuit point of view. Perhaps more so now in the modern age, insofar as they’re madly unreliable and seem to vary according to manufacturer. Even within the same manufacturer, sizing appears to drift across the years. Either that or my feet are still growing. Is that another thing with old men? Ears, noses, and now feet? So, that impression of a size 9 in the flowerbed outside the downstairs window of the remote country house and faithfully cast in plaster by the Scene of Crime team… is now probably a little less reliable than it once was. 

Biscuits? We appear to have taken a turn towards Smash Hits. How long have you got? ANZAC biscuits are first rate for dunking. I had a friend who could source American Girl Guide cookies briefly every year when they had their fundraiser on. The Majestic Digestive, of course. King of Biscuits. Should have been painted by Landseer in a Highland Glen. 

Alongside Rigger’s favourite, we mostly had Custard Creams when I was a boy. Wouldn’t give them house room now. Don’t think I’ve touched one since. Pretty grim confection, in my humble opinion. I liked the popular Spoonerism Peek Freans. You’ve got to go a long way to beat a Family Assortment. Something for everyone. Probably explains a lot about why we did the Creswell’s/Chigton Green story. Fig Rolls were popular, then, too. A biscuit surely born of the English 19th century obsession with the bowels. Half Man, Half Biscuit, Half Victorian Purgative.  

DAMIAN: And favourite sandw… Oh, why bother? And there’s probably not much point in asking what you can tell us about the penultimate Endeavour either?

RUSS: I’m very wary of giving away too much. Art imitates life imitates art imitates life. Might be easier to talk about next week. But there is a bit of creative Last Will and Testament about it. I suppose I was aware of the window of opportunity closing – almost but not quite shut. I was talking about this with Kate Saxon who directs next week’s finale. She was asking if I was down-hearted about it coming to an end. And, I think rather like Shaun, I’m genuinely not. That said, I’m very aware that I’ll never have a sandpit like it to play in again. Something about the design allowed us to push things into some unexpected places, but without ever breaking it or doing it a lasting damage. The audience has been wonderful in sticking with us and following us into those unexpected places. It’s always felt like they’ve trusted us to go off the beaten path, because they know we’ll bring them safely back home in time for tea. So – tonight is just more of my nonsense, essentially. A blend of things. Stuff happens, then the credits roll.

DAMIAN: Listen, even though I’ve been asking nicely for the best part of ten years, you’re obviously never going to tell me so I wondered, in the extremely unlikely event I ever managed to get hold of Mr. Allam and interview him, would even he be able to finally reveal what the Wednesday special is?

RUSS: Almost certainly… not.

~

Interview copyright © Damian Michael Barcroft 2023

THE ENDEAVOUR INTERVIEWS 2023: RUSSELL LEWIS PART I

Interview copyright © Damian Michael Barcroft 2023

‘Strange what one recalls…’ Despite letters home, lessons in Latin and a large collection of toy soldiers in “his early life”, it’s the vivid memory of hearing Scottish pop group, Middle of the Road’s rendition of Chirpy Chirpy Cheep Cheep blaring out of a radio at Shepperton Studios in the summer of 1971, that Russell Lewis – the writer of all thirty-six episodes of Endeavour – chose to reminisce upon in one of our past interviews prior to the broadcast of the last series and for quite obvious reasons I suppose – ‘Where’s your mama gone?’.

In Oxford of the same year – albeit a few months earlier in 1971 – we find Detective Sergeant Endeavour Morse sat alone in a pub who, by even his standards, is particularly melancholy and drowning his sorrows. Weary and hungover, the following morning he discovers there has been a terrorist bombing at his old college of Lonsdale and also – initially presumed to be racially-motivated – the Provisional IRA have threatened to shoot the black Irish football star of Oxford Wanderers, Jack Swift, if he plays against Cowley Town in the next game. Chief Superintendent Reginald Bright orders Endeavour to watch over him and keep an eye on the ball…

Graphic art by Gavin “the linesman” Lines

In my end is my beginning…
~ An exclusive Endeavour interview with writer Russell Lewis ~

DAMIAN: I believe it was Damien Timmer [executive producer and joint managing director of Mammoth Screen, the production company that made Endeavour for ITV] who wanted to set one of the stories within the world of football?

RUSS: Yes, he wanted to do a football story, and with the window inexorably closing, this was the opportunity.

DAMIAN: I think I’ve got the right Lewis when I say that you personally prefer cricket to football?

RUSS: I admire the skill involved in both, but yes it’s cricket for me. However, the passing of the great John Motson stirred up the silt and brought back a rush of memory. Across my earliest years – though I went to a very odd school where we weren’t allowed to play sport – football loomed large. Football experienced through the television rather than the terraces.

So – Saturday afternoon, in deep midwinter, was always commentators in sheepskin car-coats either phoning in the result and match report, else doing a bit to camera with the floodlights on, and behind them the stadium empty but for the sound of some teeny-bopper hit of the day coming over the public address system. The smell of hot Bovril still hanging on the evening damp air. I desperately wanted to invoke some of that, but… regrettably, it lay beyond our reach. But those commentators always looked as if they could have stepped straight out of The Offence – you know. The late great Gerald Sinstadt who left us only lately. Elton Welsby. Hugh Johns. And, I suppose, supreme at the time, the legendary Brian Moore who presented The Big Match on Sunday.

My main man Charlie Caine, we’ve been tight this past half-century and more, and who appeared in Cherubim & Seraphim, wrote to Brian Moore on his retirement, thanking him for his work and saying how much he’d miss him. And damn if Brian Moore didn’t send him the loveliest handwritten letter back – which Charlie’s still got. Yeh – he was special.

But Saturday early evening was all about The Results, and absolute silence had to reign while the old man marked off his Pools coupon. Holy ritual.

So, farewell Motty, and all those football broadcasting giants of yore, and thanks for all the memories. STRIKER was as much a salute to that as to the game itself.

John Motson

DAMIAN: I’m afraid I don’t know much about football – or any sport for that matter – but to use a cricketing term, I think! – I was going to say that Endeavour has had a good innings but that would be such a lazy way for me to broach the subject of this being the final series and I’m sure I can do better – so it’ll keep, for now, at least. Anyway, looking back at STRIKER – the first episode of the last series – and the two of us both having our own memories of the seventies including inflation, looming recession, cost of living, energy crisis and potential rationing or power cuts, industrial action and strikes, and even the possible threat of nuclear war, I was struck by how history repeats itself. In fact, there’s a quote from the American journalist and author, Sydney J. Harris, that I’d love to have made into a sign and nailed to the door of Number 10 Downing Street: ‘History repeats itself, but in such cunning disguise that we never detect the resemblance until the damage is done.’ And, goodness me, what damage they’ve done. I wonder if there’s anything you’d like to leave on the doorstep for the Prime Minister?

RUSS: A ‘Leaving’ card.

DAMIAN: As you wrote series 7, 8 and 9, to what extent did you draw upon your own experience of the early 70s and in dramatically recreating this period, what historical aspects resonated the most as you revisited those memories?

RUSS: Hmm. I hope you’ll forgive me, but at such a distance of time – and those memories being of one’s earliest years – the danger is that one just remembers bits of ‘the early 70s’. We don’t get to some of the strongest memories – the power cuts, etc., which would have been a fantastic backdrop for a story. Oxford in blackout – a call back to Thursday, Win and the Blitz. Put that light out!!! Industrial disputes. We touched on it slightly with the Post Office dispute – but that was certainly ongoing across those early years. To such a degree that it informed Hilda’s vendetta against unionised labour at the other end of the decade.

DAMIAN: Endeavour Morse was arguably at his most morose last series and yet his misery seems to have less to do with the actual turmoil of the 70s and more to do with himself. To what extent would you say that most of his problems originate not from external factors but rather internal factors?

RUSS: Well – he was carrying a lot of grief after the events of 1970. Affairs of the heart ending unhappily… probably carries more weight for a soul than a postal dispute.

DAMIAN: In the past we’ve referred to the first film, OVERTURE, and the successive couple of series at least, as Eden before the fall and an age of innocence. Given that until fairly recently, you didn’t know how long the series would last for, how have you managed to ration or portion the heartache, torment and the general highs and lows of Endeavour’s character arc over nine series?

RUSS: Well – we were already putting the bricks in the wall right from the off. Rosalind [Calloway in OVERTURE]. The death of his father at the end of series one [HOME]. We’ve always been turning the rack – a degree at a time.  

DAMIAN: You see, I knew I could do better – did you notice how expertly and subtly I managed to raise the issue of this being the final series?

RUSS: Say it ain’t so.

DAMIAN: Well, I won’t dwell on it today but rather wanted to reassure the reader that I’ll get to the questions I imagine many fans of the show would like answering in our very last interview. Anyway, is Endeavour’s introspective gloominess the main reason why Joan is open to the possibility of a relationship with someone else?

RUSS: Difficult to talk about in specific terms. But I think that – for many, perhaps for all at one time or another – there’s something true about ‘never the time, the place, and the loved one all together’. For whatever reason, if an affection goes undeclared long enough, that can be interpreted as a lack of interest.

DAMIAN: STRIKER features a beautifully played scene where Strange asks Joan to be his date at the Ladies Dinner Dance at the North Oxford Masonic Lodge and after she agrees, his face is positively beaming. I know it was a long time ago because I remember reading scenes between them in early drafts of various scripts that were cut but when did you first have the idea of Strange becoming attracted to Joan?

RUSS: It was less of a step than one might suspect. And one needs to keep these things in perspective. He needed a dinner date. And I think – because they were acquainted quite well – and have a professional association through their respective rôles at work – that when Strange asked her to help him out, it was born of a practical need rather than a years-long romantic longing. So – we probably shouldn’t read too much into it.

DAMIAN: There’s another lovely scene that I greatly enjoyed in which Endeavour drives to the halfway house for women and their children. As he sees Joan, Endeavour takes a deep breath before getting out of the Jag and she says, ‘Jim came by’, and, not wishing to appear too familiar, corrects herself, ‘Strange’. Endeavour then takes a sip from his hip flask that is seen throughout the film and offers her some but Joan declines and instead puts him in his place. Shortly afterwards, upon realising and appreciating the work that she does in providing sanctuary for vulnerable families, he observes that she’s trying to save the world and it occurred to me that this might just be his highest possible compliment to her because isn’t this exactly what Endeavour has strived to do since the death of his mother?

RUSS: I think – regarding your first point – that she understands after all this time that Endeavour is so unbending that he might not think of Strange as ‘Jim’ – which is why she adds the surname. Joan is not troubled by the same kind of thinking as Endeavour. And – for us – it just underlines the difference between them. Joan is clear eyed, open, honest about her feelings. There is no romantic involvement, so she wouldn’t think twice about mentioning Strange to Endeavour.  

Your second point, without being specific, is observed behaviour. Again – I think it’s something that would be familiar to many professionals who have dealt with bereaved children.  

DAMIAN: After she smiles and adds that she’s saving the world ‘one woman at a time’, there’s a silence between them as Joan and Endeavour look into each other’s eyes. Was the look supposed to portray regret for their past mistakes or longing for a possible future together regardless of how seemingly impossible that might be?

RUSS: There may have been some changes between the shooting script and what we ended up with. I have a vague recollection of a certain amount of back and forth on it.  But this was my original intention for the scene: Endeavour not in a good place – and this is the first time they’ve met in a long time.

To a degree it’s an example of the impact of real life on story. Mx.Vickers was unavailable for the previous and some of that had to be explained by Joan’s absence – but it creates questions itself. Why did she go to Stevenage? Was it a last roll of the dice? ‘This is what life looks like without me.’ I don’t think she’d reason it through in such terms, she’s too straight-forward for that – but perhaps it played some small part in her thinking. Another year of marching in step in Oxford, or trying something new in Stevenage.

INT. BELMONT LODGE. KITCHEN – DAY 4

ENDEAVOUR alone for a moment. Through the window, JOAN up the garden for the moment with some of the kids. He could be looking out of the window of his own house at his wife and kids. It’s a thought that might have stung once, now it’s just a dull ache. Taking advantage of being unobserved, he hauls a quarter-bottle of rotgut from his raincoat, finds himself a glass and pours out a couple of fingers. And becomes aware of JOAN watching him from the doorway. Rather than shrink from it – he tries to be inclusive.

ENDEAVOUR: Drink?       

JOAN: It’s a bit early for me. And to be honest I’d sooner you didn’t. If you’re going to talk to the kids. It’s just that most of them… have experience of men who reek of booze.

ENDEAVOUR unscrews the lid of his bottle and pours the contents of the glass back inside.

ENDEAVOUR: Well. Waste not, want not.

JOAN: Thanks.

ENDEAVOUR: You never used to be so censorious.

JOAN: You never used to put it away in the middle of the afternoon.

ENDEAVOUR: ‘Put it away?’ What’s next? “I’m going back to mother”? Accusations and recriminations. Like some couple in a bad radio play. We are all petit bourgeois now.

A long moment – in which he regrets his sniping. JOAN wounded and wearied by his sarcasm, but she reaches out all the same.

JOAN: I feel like I missed something.

What could he tell her?

ENDEAVOUR: No.

JOAN: Are you sure?

For a moment, through a chink in the armour, a glimpse of the man who once could stop her heart with a look. But bruised now, and broken past mending by love and grief and fate. 

ENDEAVOUR: Well – if you did, it was nothing very much.

JOAN: The ‘mess’ you mentioned when you wrote. Did you manage to put it right.

ENDEAVOUR: Oh, yes. 

He turns away from her to stare down the garden – silvered and shining after rain – so bright it dazzles his eyes and brings them to watering…

ENDEAVOUR: It all… ended as it should. 

JOAN: Morse…

Fearful of where pity might lead, he kills her concern dead. Overly bright and business like.

ENDEAVOUR: So, what is this place? Some sort of halfway house? I don’t know it off the council list.

JOAN: It’s not council. Just somewhere they can get away to. If they need it. Somewhere they can be safe.

ENDEAVOUR: Saving the world?

JOAN: One woman at a time.

ENDEAVOUR: What’s she like – Mrs. O’Rourke?

JOAN: Didn’t Jim say?

ENDEAVOUR: Detective Sergeant Strange has many qualities, but I wouldn’t rank sensitivity paramount amongst them.

JOAN: Oh, I don’t know. In my experience, he can be quite thoughtful when the occasion demands it. 

ENDEAVOUR: In your experience. You want to try living with him.

JOAN: I heard he ended up in hospital. Dad said you saved him.

ENDEAVOUR: No. Not really. I shouldn’t believe all you hear.

JOAN: And poor Mister Bright.

The memory of his failure is a boot to the gut.

ENDEAVOUR: It was a bad year. How was…

JOAN: Stevenage. I thought it might be a new start. But it seems children can be just as miserable and neglected there as they can in Oxford. And with Sam away, I didn’t like to leave Mum. So I came back. 

DAMIAN: You’ve explicitly referenced or alluded to various times of the year, events or holidays such as Bonfire Night (SWAY, S2:E3), Easter (RIDE, S3:E1) and Christmas/New Year (ORACLE, S7: E1 and ZENANA, S7:E3) for example. In the case of the last two, the new year or rather new decade was obviously an important theme but in STRIKER (S8:E1), why was Valentine’s Day referenced but never developed into the main story or integrated with any of the main character plots – was something cut or lost along the way or was it simply that there was so much going on politically and socially around February of that year?

RUSS: I think it was just a colour. Valentine’s Day then was not the awful tyranny it’s become now.

DAMIAN: But like births, funerals and weddings I suppose, Valentine’s Day does offer a vivid backdrop to a story?

RUSS: I always think of the ‘MARRY ME’ card received by Bathsheba Everdene.

DAMIAN: You wrote an episode of Lewis, FALLING DARKNESS (S4:E4), that was set at Hallowe’en but we’ve never seen any trick or treating in Endeavour, is this because it wasn’t such a big thing in the UK back in the sixties and early seventies?

RUSS: Absolutely. Really – next to nobody bothered. Certainly not in my part of the woods.

DAMIAN: I think it was the late seventies or very early eighties when I first remember Hallowe’en creeping its way into my part of the woods. The local newsagent sold some masks, you could sometimes get a pumpkin or at least a turnip from one or two of the markets and, perhaps rather bizarrely, the Catholic Club – next to our Catholic Church which was seen as somewhere reasonably respectable for single, divorced women like my mum and nan to have a Gold Label or two – usually held an event for the kids to dress up. Given my name, appropriately enough, I went as the Devil one year which the Sisters found quite charming if I remember rightly. Anyway, given your fascination with all things macabre, you must have celebrated Hallowe’en in some way yourself as a kid?

RUSS: Again – no. I got a book once – at a school Prizegiving – ‘For Good Behaviour’ or whatever it would have been, ‘Improvement in Tap’. And there was a poem in it about a ‘witch with a wart on her nose’. This was illustrated with a line drawing of the same. I found it  – the poem and the illustration – extremely troubling.  

DAMIAN: Regarding possible influences and inspirations, we’ve often spoken about Edgar Allan Poe in terms of his contribution to the Gothic and horror genre but I don’t think we’ve actually discussed him with respect to his pioneering work in detective fiction which he is often credited with inventing when he wrote The Murders in the Rue Morgue (1841) and, looking back, we can see that this and some of his other work established conventions and tropes such as the eccentric but brilliant sleuth – and his more by-the-book and unimaginative sidekick – solving the seemingly impossible crime and the locked room mystery to name but a few. Since such a significant part of your CV as a writer is working in this genre, I wondered how you rated Poe alongside Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and Agatha Christie?

RUSS: It’s funny you should mention Poe. I was thinking about a copy of Tales of Terror and Fantasy – a hardback, illustrated by Rackham with Pit and the Pendulum on the cover that somehow came into my possession at an impressionable age. I’ve been doing a lot of tidying the past couple of months, and I couldn’t put my hand on that book. Hope it’s not lost. Massive influence – in so many ways. The Gold Bug I think probably had a bit of influence on some of Endeavour’s code-breaking/problem solving. Impossible for me to separate from the Corman movies – which, as you know, cast a great shadow.  

But I remember the moment when Dupin reasons back his friend’s train of thought, so that he knows exactly what he’s thinking. And that’s a fantastic bit of work. Rue Morgue… Yeh. And to think some felt I’d gone too far with a Tiger… 

Bela Lugosi and friend in Murders in Rue Morgue

DAMIAN: Leave the tiger, take the gorilla. We’ve discussed the Roger Corman / Vincent Price Poe movies in great detail before and I certainly share your enthusiasm for them but what are your thoughts on the Universal Murders in Rue Morgue (1932) and the other two Karloff and Lugosi Poe films?

RUSS: I remember finding The Black Cat very heavy going. Perhaps I should give it another go. The Raven is delightfully barking. Morgue is a typically lavish Carl Laemmle production. I’m just a sucker for the old production methods.    

DAMIAN: Me too. Anyway, you’ve been doing this for so long now that I suppose it’s almost instinct or second nature to you, but do you ever catch yourself consciously emulating the tricks used by some of the aforementioned writers, or perhaps even Colin Dexter?

RUSS: No. Not really. Colin and his predecessors and peers have the advantage of it all taking place on the page in words. As I’ve said about The Way Through the Woods – Colin could write ‘Somebody found something which would later prove important’ – or words to that effect on the page, but we would have had to film who that somebody was and at least glimpse or show obscurely what had been found. So – those of us who work in a visual medium have to think in pictures. Also – I could never remember everyone’s tricks.  

DAMIAN: We’ve discussed “Plot Vertigo” before which was a phrase coined by Damien Timmer to describe when a storyline is in danger of becoming a little too confusing for the audience, but I wondered if there was any sort of rule you have regarding what constitutes too many suspects or too few?

RUSS: As many as the budget will allow. That’s a tricky one. It depends on the puzzle. Two feels quite tight. A dozen, probably too many.  

DAMIAN: And what are the key ingredients to a great MacGuffin or red herring?

RUSS: I’m not sure there are key ingredients. And a MacGuffin and a red herring are very different things. A proper red herring is probably something that seems meaningful in one light – but typically turns out not to have a bearing on the central mystery. I quite like red herrings that when unravelled give you something that doesn’t appear to illuminate the puzzle – but considered in another way, explains something else. A good red herring should deliver something – even if it’s only obfuscation. Sorry – that’s very dry. The audience or reader (which, let’s face it, are one and the same thing!) does so much of the work for you. They’re so smart. Underestimate them at your peril.  But given that what we’re about is a certain amount of sleight of hand, a good red herring encourages the audience to make 2+2 make 5.

We were probably much more Golden Age when we began – but the guys weren’t crazy about Christiesque suspects in the drawing room denouements, and didn’t really enjoy declaiming the solution, which is fair enough – so the challenge became increasingly to find other ways of delivering the answer to the puzzle, and one had to dial back on the clueage a bit.

It’s amusing – given that the Knives Out franchise has swung back very much in that Golden Age direction. But there – I think – the tongue is very much in cheek. Nevertheless, they are in a direct line of descent from the Ustinov Poirots. And with Sir Kenneth bringing the little Belgian alive again… the traditional whodunit is in safe hands for another generation or two.

DAMIAN: Another important device which again, could be attributed to Poe, is the unreliable narrator which encourages the reader or viewer to question the motives or psychological state of certain characters and how much of their version of events can be trusted. Obviously misdirection plays an important part of an engaging detective story but to what extent do you think there is a danger of cheating the audience with such tropes? 

RUSS: Oh, I don’t know. I just try to apply the same yardstick I do when I watch anything. Did I have a good time? If the answer is yes – then, it’s job done.

DAMIAN: Didn’t you once tell me that you wanted to do a locked room mystery for Endeavour?

RUSS: There was a wheeze I fancied doing in this last series, and had it been four, rather than three films I would definitely have gone there – but I suspect there would have been massive push back against it, as it was so outré. I was keen to have a go at a two-hander with just the boys. Something that drew on the great stage thrillers of the time.  Sleuth was in the cinemas, so… I visited the house where the exteriors were filmed.  Wonderful place. Delightful series of interlinked gardens. They also shot some Doctor Who there. But pottering round where Olivier and Michael Caine had trod half a century before was a pure delight, and just made me regret not pushing for our own little two-hander all the more.

An Endeavour without any onscreen suspects at all! Oxford’s Finest exploring a murderous Count Yorga style fun-house could have given full rein to a ‘locked room mystery’ in the Golden Age Style. But there we are. It might have been too much.

We’d also talked over the years of a murder taking place during an Am-Dram production of a creaky murder-mystery.  A kind of Linda Snell’s Christmas Panto meets Knives Out. But perhaps it’s just as well we stopped short given See How They Run.

Those and our version of Promised Land… Defeated by the fallout from 2016 in the main. Ah – the ones that got away.  

DAMIAN: My fault as usual but I fear we may have veered off on one of our infamous tangents so we’d better return to STRIKER. During the opening and throughout the credits, we hear the song, Won’t Get Fooled Again, by The Who. Was this something you wanted to use and, if so, which particular lyrics did you think accentuated the motifs of either the episode or series eight generally?

RUSS: It’s long been a favourite. I suppose it chimed a bit with the industrial unrest.  ‘Meet the new boss…’  

DAMIAN: I know how important the use of music is to both you and Matthew Slater [composer and conductor since series three] and having collaborated on original songs together, how do the two of you decide on what existing music to play as opposed to creating yourselves?

RUSS: Unless there’s something I’m specifically keen on, it’s best left to those that know their business.

DAMIAN: STRIKER features the appearance of Eamonn Andrews – played exceptionally well by Lewis Mcleod – in a scene where Jack Swift is surprised with the big red book. Was the genesis of this idea inspired by the This Is Your Life episode devoted to John Thaw at all?

RUSS: No. It drew very heavily on the George Best episode. Lewis was fantastic. He has Eamonned before, of course, in the Hattie biopic. So – he was obviously the go-to guy.   

DAMIAN: Both Thursday and Bright observe that Eamonn Andrews isn’t as tall as he looks on the telly, was this a joke based on something I’m not aware of or simply an observation of the sort of banal comments people often might make when they meet a celebrity?

RUSS: A bit. There’s a moment in one of the introductions to a Collection of Alan Bennett plays. Bennett is on location – I think at the seaside, so it’s possibly for One Fine Day or All Day on the Sands – and he gets talking to a stranger on a bench on the seafront. It turns out the stranger was once the batman (in the military sense!) to Montgomery of Alamein.

Expecting some incredible insight from one who knew the great man so intimately, Bennett asks, ‘What was he like?’ ‘Very smart,’ comes the reply.

So – it was inspired by that exchange. And I think then – particularly – ‘people off the telly’ did feel more removed, as if they existed or came from some other dimension. It may also have been a bit of my own surprise, having imagined Eamonn to have been a bit of a unit, sort of prize-fighter build, only to discover on closer inspection that he wasn’t.

DAMIAN: You met Eamonn Andrews?

RUSS: I have a vague recollection of doing so – but I can’t recall if it was when I was very small, or in my salad days. I spent time at Thames – which, as Magpie viewers will recall from sending in their milk bottle tops for the ‘Appeal’, was at Teddington Lock. And Eamonn was just the sort of cove one would see pottering about. I think that’s what struck with me. He was quite striking – facially. And I’ve a distant memory of being struck by the fact that he was wearing ‘powder’. It must have been when I was small. 

I do remember seeing Eric and Ern there. I’d’ve been about sixteen, I think. And Benny Hill. One of the joys of the old regional franchise studio system was you’d see all your TV favourites in the corridors or in the canteen. I loved the centralisation of that. All that talent under one roof. Just getting on with the work. Thames. ATV Birmingham and Elstree. Yorkshire. Anglia. And TVC, of course. CEEFAX or ORACLE bubbling away in the corner of Reception. It does rather make the heart ache. A visit to any of those places – for an interview, or if you were in studio… one took it for granted, I suppose, but nevertheless, one always set off with an extra spring in one’s step on those bright mornings. We were very lucky to have lived and worked through such a time.

DAMIAN: Possibly a rather banal comment of my own now but Anton Lesser’s hair seemed to be uncharacteristically long this series, was this because he was flitting between Oxford and a galaxy far, far away?

RUSS: I think Bright’s self-care has probably taken a knock. But yes – it probably owes more than a little to his extracurricular duties.

Anton in Star Wars: Andor

DAMIAN: In the final scene of STRIKER, Endeavour and Thursday discuss the case and contemplate the nature and motives of crime and those who commit them: ‘Maybe we’re as much what we hate as what we love’, Thursday says and then continues, ‘In the end, we all pick a team. Or a team picks you.’ Endeavour adds, ‘Not if you’re no good at sports. I was always the last to be chosen. The one neither side wanted in the team’ to which his friend and mentor replies, ‘I chose you’. Given the desperate condition of their relationship in the series and last episode preceding STRIKER, was this a deliberate attempt to end the film on a more optimistic tone regarding their future?

RUSS: I have often been encouraged to keep that central relationship in better repair.  The audience – and a good number of the Top Table – don’t like them to be at constant loggerheads.

DAMIAN: What can we look forward to in PRELUDE, the first film in the very final series of Endeavour set in 1972?

RUSS: It’s another request from the Upstairs. The world in which it’s set. Matt Slater got to have some fun with it. There’s a bit of a time jump from where we left Endeavour at the end of the last run – again, dictated by production schedule. Delightful guest cast who all entered into the spirit of a Zoom Readthrough with gusto.

I think – left to my own devices – I would have run one story across the last three films. But the imperative was still to deliver distinct stand-alone cases. However, hares are certainly set running in this opener. So…

Can’t say more. Need to know, old man. Need to know.

DAMIAN: Of course, but 1972 was a good year for cinema with The Godfather, The Getaway, The Candidate, Deliverance, The Poseidon Adventure and Frenzy to name but a few. Any of these appear on your mood board at any point for this series?

RUSS: The Godfather a little – but only in its ambition. Turning Castle Gate upside down in the style of Irwin Allen lay beyond our budget. We’ve sort of nodded to Bob Rusk elsewhere. There’s one that dropped in the US late in 1971, but which was released in ‘72 in the UK that had some cultural significance – so that felt fair game, and gets a look in.  

DAMIAN: I thought we might do our next interview on a Wednesday. I’ll bring the sandwiches this time – do you fancy anything in particular?

RUSS: Just make it something special.

~

Interview copyright © Damian Michael Barcroft 2023

THE JAMES BOND COMPOSERS: JOHN BARRY

Interview copyright © Damian Michael Barcroft 2021

An exclusive interview with Geoff Leonard, former independent record producer specialising in the works of John Barry and British TV theme compilations and owner of the John Barry website. Geoff is also co-author of three books on John Barry and has written liner notes for many soundtrack albums of composers such as John Barry, Roy Budd, Ron Grainer, Maurice Jarre and Johnny Harris.

DAMIAN: Geoff, tell me about yourself and how you first became interested in the music of John Barry.

GEOFF: I was the second eldest in a family of three boys and a girl, and in the late fifties/early sixties in Bristol, we led a rather sheltered life. My mother wasn’t too keen on ‘pop’ music, she didn’t like me listening to Radio Luxembourg – the only radio station playing proper pop music back then – and as I have no memory of Drumbeat – Barry’s first big TV success in 1959, I can only assume the television was turned off at that time during that summer.

Bear in mind that BBC was the only channel we could then receive at that time. ITV had started a few years previously but you had to purchase a new TV set to be able to receive it. I think I remember mum expressing outrage at the general appearance of one Adam Faith, and as he was a regular on Drumbeat, that might explain it.

Drumbeat: Adam Faith, Sylvia Sands, Vince Eager, Danny Williams, Bob Miller, The Poni-Tails, John Barry, Stewart Morris.

I really want to be able to say I saw the JB7 [The John Barry Seven] on Drumbeat, but in all honesty, I cannot recall it. Even if I saw part of a show, as seems likely seeing it ran for twenty-two weeks, at eleven years old I probably wouldn’t have been aware of the band and Barry. Eleven was very young in terms of appreciating pop music in those days, quite unlike now. I’ve even examined the details of a Saturday’s evening’s BBC TV output from that period, and frustratingly I can definitely remember watching the closing overs of England v. India at cricket which directly preceded Drumbeat

I can’t remember the first occasion on which I became really aware of his music, but it was probably through watching the weekly Saturday night BBC TV programme, Juke Box Jury, which used his ‘Hit & Miss’ composition as the signature tune from 1960 onwards. 

There was also a Sunday morning BBC radio programme entitled Easy Beat, for which he wrote the theme. It was required listening before the walk to catch the 11 o’clock service at our local church. For the first few months of Easy Beat, The John Barry Seven were resident band, but I think they had been replaced by Bert Weedon by the time I tuned in.

The John Barry Seven

The John Barry Seven soon vied with The Shadows for the position of Britain’s top small band. Although I was keen on The Shadows, too, there was some indefinable quality about the John Barry sound which made me want to start collecting his recordings from then onwards. Indeed, ‘Walk Don’t Run’ was the first 45 I ever bought, albeit a second-hand copy!

I think I paid two shillings for it – full priced singles were about six shillings and eight pence – from a shop in Gloucester Road, Bristol called Wookey & Jones. They also sold second-hand TV sets, as I recall. I must have listened to that record hundreds of times in the attic of our family home – the only place I was allowed to play music at a decent volume level – marvelling at Vic Flick’s guitar solo, which was so different from the other versions of ‘Walk Don’t Run’ released at the time. He has since told me that EMI released the take on which he felt the guitar tremelo arm effect was slightly overdone, and out of tune – which might explain my fascination! And the sound coming from those big old-fashioned speakers has never been matched. I can almost hear that opening drum sound from ‘Walk Don’t Run’ and smell the rather musty scent of the attic, prior to it being modernised.

As I grew older, I continued to collect John Barry records, which had become more and more experimental – particularly the ‘B’ sides of his singles. The famous guitar sound was now beginning to share top billing with strings. The very last track on his first studio album, Stringbeat, was entitled ‘The Challenge’, and some critics felt this was a theme written for a film yet to be made. It was in such contrast to compositions such as ‘Hit & Miss’, from only a year or so before, that even at my tender age I could tell a change was on the way. I came across his soundtrack to Beat Girl, again, in a second-hand shop. This had been an X-certificate – over 18 only film – so it wasn’t so surprising that I’d missed both the film and the album when they were originally released in 1960.

This, too, contained tracks unlike anything I’d heard before, in particular, jazz-styled numbers like ‘Time Out’ and ‘The Off Beat’. I like to think I bought all his records in those early days, mostly as soon as they come out. Some I definitely remember buying new, like ‘Starfire’, ‘The Menace’ and, of course, ‘The James Bond Theme’. I also bought an EP called ‘Theme Successes’ new for about 11 shillings and 6 pence, but ‘The John Barry Sound’ EP cost five shillings second-hand. I remind myself that before I got a regular paper-round in about 1962, pocket-money was one shilling a week which eventually rose to two and six. So the buying of new records was an absolute luxury.

Indeed, Stringbeat, my first LP, was a Christmas present in 1962 and the following year came the soundtrack album to From Russia With Love – Barry’s first real dramatic film score. I must have bored the entire family and guests almost to death by insisting on playing it repeatedly downstairs during the festivities. I was allowed down from the attic because film music seemed a mite more respectable!

Barry’s Bond and Elizabeth Taylor In London albums succeeded not only in getting me hooked on film music, but also on the cinema in general. The sixties was a great time for cinema-going in Britain and I saw all the major films – some of them more than once. From that time onwards, I became a dedicated Barry fan and record collector.

DAMIAN: At what point did you become a respected authority on Barry with record companies asking you to write the liner notes?

GEOFF: In November 1989, I’d had the idea of releasing some of John Barry’s music on CD in an effort to publicise a book on which I was working with two other staunch Barry fans – Gareth Bramley and Pete Walker. About which more later. I established that EMI – Barry’s original record company – had no plans to re-issue anything themselves, however, they were prepared to license out material and this led to Play It Again’s first release, Beat Girl/Stringbeat.

As we had very little knowledge of how to go about creating and releasing a CD, I approached James Fitzpatrick and David Stoner of Silva Screen Records, a fairly new company, which specialised in soundtracks and had already released a couple of Barry albums. They helped considerably and also agreed to distribute the CD.

A year or so later, David Stoner attempted to license some Barry tracks from Polydor for a compilation album, but when he explained what he wanted, their own commercial division stepped in and decided they wanted to do one of their own. This is always the risk you take, when approaching a company in this way!

Anyway, knowing of my keenness, David suggested I contact Polydor and offer CD notes, as he was fairly sure they would not have the expertise themselves. I did so, and he was right, they were happy to accept my help, and together with Pete Walker, wrote my first ever CD notes.

After that, we did a lot of Barry projects for Silva Screen, more for our own label, Play It Again, and gradually became known for our detailed John Barry notes, though we also did a few for other composers, particularly Roy Budd.

DAMIAN: How did you meet Pete Walker and Gareth Bramley, the other two co-authors of your first book on Barry, A Life in Music?

GEOFF: Previously, at some point during the early eighties, I had decided it was a good idea to write a book about John Barry. I’m not sure why, maybe it was because there was so little ever written about him, and now he lived in America, one only rarely saw or heard him in the media. Bear in mind there was no internet at the time so research was no easy matter! Through my brother, John, who was head of sound at the RSC at that time, I got in touch with Trevor Peacock, who had worked with Barry on Passion Flower Hotel, and through him, Vic Flick.

Vic Flick

At that stage I realised it was going to be tough going on my own, and then through sheer chance noticed what appeared to be a fellow Barry fan advertising for rare Barry records – some so rare I knew they didn’t exist! – in a monthly magazine called Record Collector, which is still going strong.

I contacted him – Gareth Bramley – and he replied saying he was too busy with bank exams to help, but coincidentally he’d also been approached by another Barry fan, Pete Walker, who had wanted to write an article on Barry for Record Collector.

Cutting a lengthy story short, Pete and I made contact and started researching and writing, and were eventually joined by Gareth, who being an avid collector, concentrated on the discography side of things. And that combination took us through ‘A Life in Music’ and ‘Midas Touch’, before just Pete and I researched and wrote ‘Hit and Miss – The Story of the John Barry Seven’ without Gareth.

DAMIAN: ‘A Life in Music’ and ‘Midas Touch’ are excellent accounts of Barry’s life and career, lavishly illustrated and have an extremely detailed discography. However, in addition to all this, the book benefits greatly from the cooperation of some of his famous collaborators over the years. How confident were you that you’d be able to get the cooperation of any of the key players before you began the project?

GEOFF: I don’t think we had any great expectations at the outset. Vic Flick proved an excellent raconteur, as did EMI engineer Malcolm Addey, Bobby Graham and Alan Bown – from the JB7 days – but others proved very difficult to engage, or, indeed, contact. Certainly as regards ‘A Life in Music’, we had virtually no help from John Barry, but didn’t realise at the time that a rival book was being written with his cooperation. At least, with his cooperation for a while.

Of course, research turned up interviews with directors such as Peter Hunt, Bryan Forbes, John Glen and Terence Young, which proved most illuminating, and eventually we found interviews Barry himself had given, via visits to the British Newspaper Library and BBC Written Archives, who were both extremely helpful, but only rarely did we get the chance to speak directly with these people. Don Black also proved helpful, especially after we’d released The Don Black Songbook on CD!

After both books came out, more-or-less simultaneously, Barry publicly dismissed the rival book and championed ours!

DAMIAN: Tell me about the research and writing process of ‘A Life in Music’, ‘The Man With the Midas Touch’ and ‘Hit and Miss’.

GEOFF: This tends to vary, but I would say my own strength is research and Pete’s is writing. Some of my knowledge is in my own head, of course, so I have to type it all out, and then Pete can add his own take on the subject and mould it into something which is hopefully interesting and accurate. Occasionally I will write complete paragraphs and Pete might only suggest a couple of changes. However, on other occasions he might suggest a totally different approach.

Researching at such places as the BBC and the BFI is easier because we always go together and simply split the tasks, collating everything later on. I suppose it’s an unusual way of working as we live some 80 miles apart, so most discussion is by email or phone, but it works and we’ve never fallen out over anything!

DAMIAN: Why did you stop producing CDs under the Play It Again Records label?

GEOFF: It was basically a combination of economics and the unavailability of music that could be licensed. The TV Theme albums sold quite well to begin with, but our final one, The A to Z Volume 4, sold poorly, partly, I feel, because much of the content consisted of lesser known material. We had released virtually every popular theme that could be licensed, so there didn’t seem to be a way of releasing any further TV theme albums and still at least recoup costs.

As regards Barry film scores, and indeed, some by other composers, I found it impossible to license anything without providing unaffordable guarantees to the companies concerned. To give an example, one company wanted a 3-CD deal with guaranteed sales of 10,000 units per CD — it just wasn’t realistic.

DAMIAN: I’ve been listening to Barry’s first records on three excellent compilation albums, The John Barry Sound: The Mono Years 1957-1962 and The John Barry Seven: Hits, Misses, Beat Girls & 007s and John Barry: The Early Years.

For fans such as myself who are more familiar with his James Bond and Hollywood scores, there are lots of surprises to be found in these collections of his early work such as hearing Barry himself actually singing.

GEOFF: John could sing in tune, which is always a good start, but it was just an average – though deep – voice and he lacked the charisma of some of the popular singers of the day. It all sounded a little dull!

DAMIAN: There are tracks which encompass elements of pop, jazz and rock and roll, but what musical genre would you say generally best describes Barry’s early work?

GEOFF: The very early vocals were simply an attempt to copy the sound of American rock ‘n’ Roll singers or groups, and failed to sell. Then he turned to instrumentals, which did better, but really only started to work when he brought in guitarist Vic Flick and pianist Les Reed. From 1960-62, Barry, mainly through the Seven, released a succession of pure pop music records, focusing on the guitar, highly popular at the time, but also adding the string sound which had made Adam Faith’s records so distinctive and popular. This was the hit period for which I would say he is most remembered.

DAMIAN: Some of these records of the late 50s and early 60s – so obviously predating the release of the first James Bond film, Dr. No in 1962 – display musical traits that would later be associated with the Bond theme and 007 soundtracks more generally.

GEOFF: From very early on Barry had wanted to score films, and there’s no doubt he used some of his early JB7 records as experiments to further those aims. For example, the library music tracks he wrote for Chappell in 1959, were designed for use by TV or film dramas, and, although what he wrote for Beat Girl at about the same time, is somewhat different, the basic brass ideas are present in some tracks, including the main title. When he scored Never Let Go shortly afterwards, you can hear the influence of tracks such as ‘Beat for Beatniks’ and ‘Big Fella’, and this carried over to future projects, such as ‘The James Bond Theme’.

DAMIAN: Is it possible to divide what we might describe as Barry-esque or Barry’s trademark sound into the following three main phases: early pop/jazz/rock and roll, the full orchestral scores for film and television and finally his more gentle and intimate concept albums such as the hauntingly beautiful The Beyondness of Things and Eternal Echoes or is it a lot more complicated than this?

GEOFF: You can certainly spot the change from pop to full-time film music which I would say started with From Russia with Love in 1963, but from then onwards it’s more complex because of the variety of projects he tackled. For instance, during the rest of the sixties he had the Bryan Forbes films alongside the Bonds, and ‘swinging sixties’ romps such as The Knack, a spy film, The Ipcress File — so differently scored from a Bond, alongside epics like The Lion in Winter. They all had a Barry trademark sound, but all very different.

Then into the seventies, you had Mary, Queen of Scots, alongside Walkabout, The Last Valley, Robin and Marian and King Kong. Maybe not quite as varied as the sixties list, but still impressively different from each other.

Once he had settled in America, and especially after he had married in the late seventies, his trademark became much more string dominated, often attached to romantic films. Even some of his Bond films reflected that, like Moonraker and Octopussy, but at the same time he was also writing Somewhere in Time, Body Heat and Frances

He didn’t say as such, but I’ve often wondered if the concept albums he did towards the end of his career came about as a direct result of him not getting what he considered were suitable films to score.

DAMIAN: I know that Barry was obsessed with film scores from an early age, but are there any particular composers you think directly influenced his work?

GEOFF: He often talked about growing up with films scored by Max Steiner, Alfred Newman, Korngold and the like, but I don’t hear anything in their work that appears to have influenced him.

DAMIAN: How significant do you think Beat Girl, Barry’s first film score, was in highlighting the potential for soundtrack releases in the UK?

GEOFF: It sold reasonably well at the time, but to be honest, that was probably more as a result of Adam Faith having three songs on it. I think it was later film musical albums such as Cliff Richard with The Young Ones that helped more in this respect, but we have to remember that Barry himself didn’t have huge success with soundtracks in the UK; they fared much better in America.

DAMIAN: I don’t know about yourself but I’ve found that having a passion for film and television scores and collecting soundtracks is a lonely hobby. I never had any friends during my childhood or teenage years who shared my enthusiasm and most people weren’t even aware of soundtracks beyond Grease, Dirty Dancing or maybe a Disney film. What were your experiences like?

GEOFF: I had one friend who was a huge Barry fan during our teenage years, but we lost touch after we both started work, so after that I knew nobody else who was even the slightest interested in soundtracks, whoever the composer was!

DAMIAN: Also, prior to the internet, soundtracks were really difficult to get hold of weren’t they?

GEOFF: They certainly were. In fact, it wasn’t really until I started visiting London in the late seventies that I managed to start filling gaps in my collection, through visits to specialist shops like 58 Dean Street.

You might see the occasional Bond album in record shops on release, but, from a Barry perspective, the chances of finding a score such as say, The Last Valley, was remote. I found albums in London to films I had no idea existed, let alone scored by Barry!

DAMIAN: Can you remember buying your first soundtrack?

GEOFF: The first one I actually bought as opposed to being given, was Elizabeth Taylor In London (1963). Beat Girl was acquired about the same time, but obviously a few years after its original release in 1960. CD-wise, I suppose Beat Girl/Stringbeat is prized by me because it was my idea and our first Play It Again CD.

DAMIAN: What was the first Bond film you saw at the cinema?

GEOFF: It’s a bit hazy now, being so long ago, but I have a feeling it was From Russia with Love, by which time I could legally see it without being accompanied by an adult. I saw Dr. No some time later, because in those days films often “came round again.”

DAMIAN: We’d better not get into the debate regarding who actually wrote what as the controversy is well documented elsewhere but simply say that Monty Norman is credited with writing the Bond theme while Barry created the arrangements. Perhaps a far more interesting question – albeit undoubtedly an equally difficult one – Norman also wrote the film score for Dr. No which is good but hardly in the same league as when Barry took the baton in From Russia With Love. And, although the films seemed almost instantly iconic and unique owing to aspects such as Terence Young’s direction, Peter Hunt’s editing, Ken Adam’s production design and Maurice Binder’s famous opening gunbarrel and title sequences, do you think the James Bond scores – and, indeed the film series itself – would have had quite the same impact, longevity and become such a cultural phenomenon if Norman had continued and the scores and songs never had the Barryesque Bond sound?

GEOFF: Norman was never really a film music composer so it’s hard to visualize what might have happened in those circumstances. I don’t think he would have been capable of producing a series of Bond scores, regardless of style. The producers didn’t ask him back for From Russia With Love purely because they realised his limitations on Dr. No, whatever other reasons are posited. I’m sure the films would have continued to be a success almost no matter who scored them — there’s quite a few composers who could have done this successfully — but they would not include Monty Norman, who was basically a song writer.

DAMIAN: Barry wrote the music for eleven Bond films and, in addition to the Bond theme from Dr. No, that iconic Barry/Bond sound first became truly apparent with the title sequence of From Russia With Love – which was actually instrumental instead of using the theme song that became the norm from Goldfinger onwards apart from On Her Majesty’s Secret Service – and is perhaps best exemplified by tracks such as ‘007 Takes the Lektor’ (also From Russia With Love), ‘Oddjob’s Pressing Engagement’ and ‘Bond Back in Action’ (Goldfinger), ‘Mr. Kiss Kiss Bang Bang’ (Thunderball) and possibly his crowning achievement, every single perfect note of On Her Majesty’s Secret Service. Now, David Arnold consummately and spectacularly recaptured this Barryesque sound with tracks like ‘White Knight’ and ‘Company Car’ (Tomorrow Never Dies) and ‘Blunt Instrument’ and.. well, like On Her Majesty’s Secret Service, the score for Casino Royale is pretty much perfect.

And yet, when Arnold deviates from this sort of Barryesque template, as he did perhaps most significantly with Die Another Day, it doesn’t quite work in my opinion. To what extent do you think a Bond composer should stick to the traditional ingredients or formula as opposed to experimenting to make it fresh and pursue their own musical direction?

GEOFF: What we never know on these occasions is what guidance the composer gets from the director and producers. Do they ask for a “traditional” Bond score of the kind David Arnold gave us for Tomorrow Never Dies — which I think worked very well, after the Serra problem -– or is the composer left very much to his own devices. Arnold was able to do his own thing to a certain extent but still retained the basics of what we’d become used to hearing, but Thomas Newman scored his films as he might have scored any action thriller, and although I know some liked this way, it didn’t break any new ground for me. The Bond “sound” has become so well established, it’s very hard to deviate too much, in my opinion, whoever the composer.

DAMIAN: Can we agree that although clearly referencing a sixties sound, some of the aforementioned best examples of Barry and Arnold represent the classic but also timeless sound of Bond?

GEOFF: Yes, they are timeless in many respects. I know some who say time and the films have moved on and Barry – in particular – could never score one successfully in 2021 or whenever, but I disagree. He knew the subject matter so well, and always had the talent to write what would work on the screen. He could have scored Spectre without any difficulty and in a highly unique way — he always did that with Bond films!

DAMIAN: What are your thoughts regarding the more dated and obviously period soundtracks such as Live and Let Die (George Martin), The Spy Who Loved Me (Marvin Hamlisch) and For Your Eyes Only (Bill Conti)?

GEOFF: I enjoyed them in the films themselves, I thought they worked well, but less so as albums to listen to away from the films. Particularly For Your Eyes Only, which I rarely play. Funnily enough, they all had excellent theme songs.

DAMIAN: I do enjoy the cheesy sort of disco-pop sound of tracks like ‘Bond ‘77’ (The Spy Who Loved Me) and ‘Runaway’ (For Your Eyes Only) but do you think scores like this could have only worked for Roger Moore’s Bond?

GEOFF: It’s hard to imagine them being used elsewhere in the series, that’s true. I don’t think Bond should “do disco” but I did enjoy tracks like ‘Bond ‘77’, which certainly worked well in the film.

DAMIAN: And Barry’s final Bond score, The Living Daylights, was also very period with its combination of 80’s synth and orchestra.

GEOFF: Yes, Barry wanted an update in sound to reflect the new Dalton era, though it turned out to be a very short one, through no fault of his own. It might have been period but for me worked perfectly for that film. It would have been interesting to hear how Barry would have approached Licence to Kill, because I felt Kamen’s score, although good, just didn’t quite get it right.

DAMIAN: I didn’t much care for Eric Serra’s score for GoldenEye but what did you make of it?

GEOFF: I thought the score worked in a few places but was obviously missing the Bond theme, hence the decision to re-score the tank scene. For me, it’s not a satisfying experience listening to Serra’s score away from the film. I realise the film always comes first, and any score album is often just a bonus, but other Bond scores usually managed both successfully. Michael Wilson himself said he thought “the jury was still out” on Serra’s score. I know Barry thought a new approach might work based on what he had previously heard from Serra, but when he saw the film he felt that Serra had gone in another direction. I think the producers knew they were in trouble and the Bond theme is usually a good way out!

DAMIAN: And you said earlier that Thomas Newman scored Skyfall and Spectre as he might have scored any action thriller which I thought was a pretty accurate assessment. As a long-time collaborator of director Sam Mendes, it’s obvious why Newman got the job but I thought these scores were rather lacklustre and had too much of the Newman sound and not enough Bond.

GEOFF: I can only agree with that. There’s much to admire about Newman as a composer, but notwithstanding the fact that the style of Bond films have changed in many ways, even since David Arnold’s last one, neither of those films had a score that sounded like a Bond score to me. I’m not suggesting his scores didn’t work, it’s just that I felt they could have worked even better, had he taken a more traditional approach!

DAMIAN: Hans Zimmer is another fine composer with a very distinctive sound but do you think he’s the right choice for the new Bond film, No Time to Die?

GEOFF: On the evidence of his body of work, I wouldn’t have said he was a natural fit for a Bond score. However, he is clearly highly talented and will likely have risen to the occasion. A lot will depend on the nature of the film, and only time will tell us that!

DAMIAN: What’s your favourite Bond score?

GEOFF: On Her Majesty’s Secret Service.

DAMIAN: Mine too. Favourite Bond song?

GEOFF: ‘Goldfinger’.

DAMIAN: Same. Favorite Bond film?

GEOFF: From Russia with Love, though I admit this changes!

DAMIAN: I’d have to say On Her Majesty’s Secret Service or Casino Royale. And favourite Bond?

GEOFF: Timothy Dalton.

DAMIAN: Really?, mine too! I’m also very fond of George Lazenby because I think he did a fantastic job under the most difficult of circumstances, but I’d say Dalton was the most talented actor to play the part and I thought Dalton looked perfect as Bond. When I read Fleming it’s him that I see. Away from Bond, what are some of your favourite Barry scores?

GEOFF: The Ipcress File, The Knack, The Lion In Winter, Midnight Cowboy, Walkabout, The Tamarind Seed, King Kong, Body Heat, Dances with Wolves, Chaplin.

DAMIAN: Do you have any plans for more Barry books or CD releases?

GEOFF: Delighted to say that I am about to publish my latest book in collaboration with Pete Walker and Jon Burlingame, after having taken the best part of two years to complete. ‘Music by John Barry’ is a detailed examination of over forty Barry scores, representing every stage of his career from his first, Beat Girl, to his last, Enigma.  At almost 500 pages, it’s by far the longest book in which I have been involved.

Presented chronologically, each chapter focuses on a specific score; several of them Bond ones. Since Jon Burlingame has already written extensively about 007 in his book, ‘The Music of James Bond’, Pete Walker and I have provided fresh perspectives on those Bond films featured. Also included are essays on Zulu, The Ipcress File, Midnight Cowboy and Body Heat alongside Oscar-winners Born Free, The Lion in Winter and Dances with Wolves, plus many more besides. The book is expected to be available within the next two months once the picture content has been finalised.

As for CDs, despite wrapping up Play It Again a good while back, I decided to start another label, Windmill Records, in order to issue the occasional CD. The first of these – John Barry – The Early Years – was released about seven years ago; the second, and latest, The Stringbeat Years – Songs accompanied by John Barry, within the last twelve months; this, a comprehensive 4-CD box set containing virtually every song arranged and accompanied by Barry during his pre-Bond years. So, as spasmodic as these releases may be, hopefully, when they do arise, they will find favour by filling a gap in the market.

DAMIAN: Well, good luck with those Geoff and I’ll certainly be adding them to my collection. Hopefully we can talk again when the book is out but for now, thank you very much indeed.

GEOFF: My pleasure, I enjoyed it!

You can register your interest in this book by emailing musicby@johnbarry.org.uk

More information about John Barry can be found via the link below where you will also be able to purchase some of the aforementioned books and CDs:

John Barry Org

Interview copyright © Damian Michael Barcroft 2021