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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: 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 ENDEAVOUR INTERVIEWS 2021: MATTHEW SLATER

Interview copyright © Damian Michael Barcroft 2021

DAMIAN: Russ thinks it was either a sunny Saturday or Sunday morning in late July that he began writing his original libretto for what was then ‘The Devil’s Bride or A Cure for Love’. When did you first hear about his plans to create these opera pieces for Endeavour?

MATTHEW: I think possibly when Russ and I had one of our periodic suppers in London. At the time, I didn’t grasp the gravity of what Russ was suggesting. We mused about the idea of giving away the entire plot of the series within the opera’s libretto in old Italian. I didn’t realise then how big a task that was. 

DAMIAN: So was this before or after he had actually written the scripts for series seven?  

MATTHEW: No, the opera came out during that process. I remember trying not to put too much pressure on Russ’ time as I was fully aware he was under the usual massive amount of pressure delivering revisions on scripts etc. 

DAMIAN: I believe you and Russ agreed on the style and period together but what were the deciding factors in ultimately choosing baroque?

MATTHEW: We did. Russ and I spoke of a style akin to Pergolesi’s early operas. When we reviewed his early operas, they seemed to set the staging ideas for those scenes set in Venice incredibly well.  

DAMIAN: How, and at what point, did Nicoló Rosetti become involved?

MATTHEW: Nico is a close friend of mine, native Italian, Cambridge Masters and more degrees than you can shake a mortarboard hat at. I asked him whether he’d take on the challenge of translating the text into old Italian, to which he very kindly jumped at the chance. Nico had to do some work with the original text from Russ to set in the context that works with the translation to old Italian, hence why we had to translate it back for me to work. I was working in Venice when I started composing the opera, and Nico came onboard simultaneously. When back in London, we worked together in the process of translation and composition ensuring we were as authentic as possible.

DAMIAN: To what extent did Nicoló’s translation shape the phraseology – weren’t there certain words that didn’t directly translate or wouldn’t have been said during the period? – and did this affect the tempo of your score at all?

MATTHEW: Massively. This was a huge intellectual undertaking, so his knowledge and experience very much led me. Luckily, Nico was also a fan of opera, so he was fully aware of how things should be structured. His input was crucial for making it as authentic as it turned out.

DAMIAN: How much time did you have to compose and record the music for series seven and how much of this was devoted to the opera sequences?

MATTHEW: The opera was composed during the early stages of production as it was required to be shot on set from film 1. We had a few months before the shoots, so whilst it was a huge undertaking, we had the time to do it properly with period instruments and period tuning. What was also incredibly handy for film 3, in which the bulk of the opera is on screen, was being directed by the wonderful Kate Saxon, an experienced stage director in her own right. We were very lucky with that. I remember being in a theatre in Catford / Venice seeing Kate put together our opera, and I got very excited. This is something I’d like to do for real, I thought. 

Matthew with the director, Kate Saxon

DAMIAN: Were you able to spend much time researching baroque opera and are there any examples that might have inspired a particular texture or flavour to your music?

MATTHEW: I did get enough time to research and across many periods, from Pergolesi to Verdi. It was a great experience to study some incredible and inspiring works.  

DAMIAN: From simply listening to your music, I know that you continuously strive to be bolder and more experimental while still remaining true to the Endeavour universe, but I also know from our previous interviews that while you always add something new to every score – I think you use the term score personality – you’re still able to capture exactly what the directors, producers and, of course Russ, want from each film. However, in addition to continuing to write television scores that are indistinguishable from big-budget Hollywood movies – such as the ‘March of the Mummy’ theme from CARTOUCHE (S5:E2) – you’re also able to create music for original songs that sound exactly like pop hits from the era – ‘Make Believe You Love Me’ from CANTICLE (S4:E2) for example – and yet, while I obviously acknowledge and greatly appreciate your achievements as a composer, I can’t help but wonder if the prospect of certain monumental challenges such as composing original music for a baroque opera are just so daunting that even you might occasionally pause for a moment and doubt if you’ll be able to pull it off?

MATTHEW: Oh, heck yes!! This was the closest I’ve been to saying, “nope, can’t be done!” But, sitting back, pen and paper, a few bars come out, then a few more, and finally 500 bars of music sit in front of me, ready to record. Then, we placed it in front of four outstanding singers and a baroque LMO orchestra, and suddenly we had a new opera from the 1720’s!! It’s pretty remarkable. It was a massive team effort, as it always is in the Endeavour family.

DAMIAN: When you were creating the music for Bright’s Public Information Film in PYLON (S6:E1) “If the Pelican can – then so can you…”, I think you did a bit of singing while chatting to Russ, was there any such humming and warbling as you discussed ideas with him for ‘The Cure for Love’?

MATTHEW: Not really. Russ and I have a perfect collaborative relationship. He sends me the material, and I send him back the finished piece, with a review point somewhere in the middle. Of course, I always have to run everything via production, but they are also excellent to just let Russ and I get on with it. It’s a very no-nonsense approach and doesn’t take up much time. I’m forever in his debt for his trust and belief, even if I think slightly misplaced from time to time! I’m always somewhat worried about what will come next series, which is fun too.

DAMIAN: In contrast to your usual practice of standing in front of and conducting the London Metropolitan Orchestra in a recording studio, was there not the added pressure of the opera actually being filmed and in front of all the extras, the stunning sets and beautiful costumes in the theatre – and also, not least, your cameo?

MATTHEW: Oh yes, but it was enormous fun and has inspired me to do something theatre based at some point. I’m not so sure about being in front of the camera, but I did have a lot of fun on set. 

DAMIAN: You’re following in the footsteps of some of the great composers/conductors who’ve cameoed on screen like Bernard Herrmann in The Man Who Knew Too Much or John Barry in The Living Daylights! Whose idea was it for you to make an appearance?

MATTHEW: I think that was Kate Saxon and maybe Russ had a little hand in it. When it was suggested, I thought they must be having a laugh, but seeing as we had live musicians on set, it made sense for me to conduct as I’d written the thing. And it’s pretty cool to be in a show like Endeavour, even for a few seconds. 

DAMIAN: Series seven had a unique running theme, and I wondered to what extent this allowed you to focus on developing certain moods or textures as opposed to the aforementioned different score personalities of previous films that haven’t typically shared such a strong and unifying story arc?

MATTHEW: A dream. I was able to reference themes I’d written for the arias and recits in the opera. It was wonderful to create score based themes for Endeavour and Violetta and unfold the drama with the dark characters. The very final sequence where we just used the whole end of the opera was a dream come true. I remember laying it up to picture and thinking Kate’s never going to go with 11 minutes of this, but she was totally behind the idea, and it ended up (more or less) in the final film. We went big for that and increased the orchestra to symphonic size, which was utterly amazing.

DAMIAN: I understand that you composed a lot more music for ‘The Cure for Love’ than appears in the finished film, so I’m wondering if you might ever consider completing the whole opera and perform it one day?

MATTHEW: Oh yes. Russ, Nico, I and the music team are all looking to complete the opera into a 45 minute stage work that local opera groups could perform. This would also be recorded with a modern orchestra and expanded into a hybrid period and modern piece. We’ve had quite some interest in this, so watch this space. 

DAMIAN: Russ told me that ‘The Cure for Love’ remains one of the loveliest things he’s been involved with across the show and something very close to his heart. So, my final question is what on earth can you possibly do for an encore?

MATTHEW: It’s one of mine too. I don’t know any other show in the world where we can do these amazing things. It’s truly a gift as a composer and one I never take for granted. I feel our days are growing shorter, so whenever the end be, I think musically it has to have the gravity it deserves to place the final score downbeat on Colin and Russ’ characters. Morse, Lewis, Endeavour, Thursday, Strange, Bright, DeBryn, Joan and hundreds if not thousands of others since 1986. This is a task of responsibility, and I guess, the hardest encore of all. 

DAMIAN: Matthew, thanks yet again. It’s always such a treat for a film and television music geek like myself to talk soundtracks with an actual composer – cheers Maestro!

MATTHEW: You are always very welcome.

Interview copyright © Damian Michael Barcroft 2021

THE ENDEAVOUR INTERVIEWS 2021: RUSSELL LEWIS PART III

An exclusive interview with the writer and executive producer of Endeavour

Interview copyright © Damian Michael Barcroft 2021

DAMIAN: A dark, cloudy sky replete with full moon, a moody and misty canal and various other eerie shots. We’re back to where we began series seven with a bit of boo!!! Back in the day, when we were both still in shorts, you’d often refer to the assortment of genres – or at least different styles – of Endeavour episodes within a series as a selection box of chocolates. Given that you only had three episodes to play with, do you regret not having the space to offer more of a variety of “flavours” and would you ideally have preferred to have had some more space between the similar horror elements of both ORACLE (S7:E1) and ZENANA (S7:E3)?

RUSS: Well — I’d always have far sooner have had four or more films — but three is what Shaun and Rog were prepared to do, so you cut according to your cloth. It also dictated to a degree the shape of the thing. Three was a very new shape for us. We wanted a bit of a triptych.

DR BYRNE: Admit men into our women’s college, you would invite the wolf inside the citadel. We cannot underestimate this. The barbarian is at the gate! Within this college we are safe, we are free. Beyond the pale, we are neither of these things. We are prey.

DAMIAN: ‘Inviting the wolf’ and women as ‘prey’. You’ll no doubt be familiar with Angela Carter and her feminist reworkings of classic fairy tales with gothic horror elements such as Little Red Riding Hood and the Big Bad Wolf. Was it your intention to use the imagery of the wolf as a predator in a similar way?

RUSS: Yeh — I’d thought we’d not ‘done a scary’ in the previous series, and this was an attempt to fold some of that into 1970. To go full Hammer gothic. I think there was as much a nod to vampirism as lycanthropy to begin with. A lot more Grand Guignol. But not everyone shares my enthusiasm for such things. So… The majority of that fell away in shooting the opener.

DAMIAN: And you must have seen the wonderful The Company of Wolves (1984)?

RUSS: I saw it at the pictures when it came out — because I’m very old. Extraordinary looking picture.

‘The Company of Wolves’ adapted by Angela Carter based on her short story of the same name.

DAMIAN: After the opening montage we cut to another female victim of the Towpath Killer and Max makes the following observations while examining the body: ‘Broken neck. There are wounds adjacent to the jugular. Bruising at the trauma site suggests the attacker sucked, or attempted to suck her blood.’ Thursday somewhat sneeringly asks if they’ve still arrested the right suspect, to which Endeavour tries to reply, ‘It doesn’t mean…’, but Thursday interjects, ‘It means you’re not as smart as you like to give out.’ Obviously the relationship between the two has deteriorated over the years but I was wondering if you think the animosity really began to take root in CODA (S3:E4) with Endeavour disapproving of Thursday beating up the gang associate in the garage?

RUSS: I think it’s cumulative – but yes, I think it’s the first time Endeavour expresses disapproval of Thursday’s methods. It’s the flipside of the avuncular Blue Lamp demeanour that’s been on show since the off. But let’s not forget that he lamped Teddy Samuels in what is now called OVERTURE — albeit with Endeavour out of the room.

BRIGHT: We would have got him a deal sooner if we’d been listened to. Morse meant well, of course, and his record speaks for itself. I’m not suggesting any repercussions for him. Not for a moment, no. But we invested too much faith in his abilities. Backed his instincts too wholeheartedly. We gave him his head. Overindulged him. And he was wrong.

DAMIAN: While the troubles between Thursday and Endeavour may be understandable, Bright has no such quarrels with Endeavour that I can think of – at this early point in the episode at least – so isn’t all this a bit disappointing and harsh of the Chief Superintendent, almost as though he has regressed back to the irascible and incredulous Bright of old that we originally met in GIRL (S1:E1)?

RUSS: I think Bright had troubles of his own at home — and is not fully his best self. Presumably the pressure from Division is considerable — and they’re looking for a scapegoat.

DAMIAN: I asked you at the beginning of these interviews this year how your memory was and you told me ‘unreliable.’ Well, I’m afraid mine is too because you were absolutely right that Mrs Thursday invites Endeavour to Christmas dinner: ‘The children get out a game or two for after the Queen, and Fred has a doze in front of the big film.’ Lovely that, given their age, she still refers to Joan and Sam as children but I was wondering what games they might have played?

RUSS: What are we looking at… 1970? Oh — the John Waddington Songbook, wouldn’t you think? The big two – obviously. And Totopoly, perhaps? Formula One? Risk – which I think then was Parker Brothers? As was Moviemaker – which I liked a lot. Go For Broke arrived in ‘65, so that might’ve been in with a shout. Sorry! In the manner of Grahame Garden on I’m Sorry I Haven’t A Clue — ‘That was my word.’ Or in this case game.

DAMIAN: Was there ever any explanation in any of the drafts of the script for this episode as to why Joan and Sam didn’t visit at Christmas?

RUSS: I honestly can’t recall. I think the idea was that they were in the back room watching TV. We didn’t have Jack or Sara available — so…

DAMIAN: Given he was raised as a Quaker, would Endeavour have celebrated Christmas as a kid?

RUSS: The Quakerism was on his mum’s side — so I suspect he got a bit of traditional Woolworth’s Christmas with his father.

DAMIAN: Another victim of the Towpath Killer victim is called Petra Cornwell. Any relation to Patricia Cornwell, the author of the Scarpetta crime novels and Portrait of a Killer: Jack the Ripper – Case Closed?

RUSS: I think it’s one of those instances where Clearance dictated what we could or couldn’t have. It wasn’t intentional. Cornwell from Bernard or Hugh, most likely. And then Clearance probably offered up Petra or Cleopatra or Immelmahey, and so we had Hobson’s Choice.

DAMIAN: Anyway, there’s a wonderful scene where Endeavour and Thursday once again come to blows as they argue over the killer’s MO…

ENDEAVOUR: Let’s not clutch at straws to save our blushes. Three women, one man. It’s the same killer for all. Whoever killed Molly Andrews killed this young woman.
THURSDAY: Oh, yeah? You’d like that to be true, wouldn’t you? Show me up. “The old man’s losing his touch.” Is that it?
ENDEAVOUR: I didn’t say that.
THURSDAY: You didn’t need to. But before you get all high and mighty, let’s not forget you had all this down for Naomi Kane’s killer.
ENDEAVOUR: Yes, I know. But if we’re being honest about it, when it comes to something like this, you’ve never really had that much touch to lose, have you?
THURSDAY: This is what I get, is it? I’ve stuck my neck out for you more than you know.
ENDEAVOUR: Yes, of course you have. Who wouldn’t? I mean, bank robberies, car thieves, yeah, there’s no one better. But if it’s something that demands a little bit of intellect or a little bit of finesse then…
THURSDAY: You arrogant, conceited…
MAX: Gentlemen! You will conduct yourselves with decorum and the solemnity appropriate to this situation or you will find some other place to stand. If you want to carry on like that, you will find yourself another pathologist. Am I understood?
ENDEAVOUR: Max, I’m sorry, I…
MAX: Am I understood? Then we shall say two o’clock.
STRANGE: 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.

DAMIAN: Lot’s to unpack here but first of all, ‘save our blushes’ or more usually ‘spare my blushes’ is a true Russ-ism, are you aware that you use this phrase a lot – particularly in real life?

RUSS: Work in television long enough and you have a lot of blushes that want sparing.

DAMIAN: It’s a wonderful scene as I say, splendidly dramatic with the sort of dialogue that I imagine all concerned savour delivering with particular delight but also – or at least I found it to be so – really rather endearingly humorous. Wasn’t it beautifully performed when Max tells them off and Endeavour and Thursday look to the ground in shame almost like two naughty school children?

RUSS: When Max loses it, you know you’ve crossed a line.

DAMIAN: And Max and Strange almost appear to be taking the role of parents or school teachers in uttering the sadly cliched but terribly accurate words, ‘Am I understood?’ and ‘I hope you’re pleased with yourselves’. It tickles me that it’s almost as though parents and teachers are on autopilot and simply repeating what their own parents and teachers said to them when they were children. And teachers in particular can’t seem to help themselves by adding ‘abundantly’ to things like ‘do I make myself clear’ even though most young children probably don’t even know what abundantly means.

RUSS: Well — it clearly takes a lot to drive either Max or Strange to take issue with Endeavour and/or Thursday. When you love people, it’s tough to watch them tear each other apart.  

DAMIAN: Particularly apparent in this scene, isn’t it astonishing to behold the transition of Strange as we met him in GIRL (S1:E1) and his slow and subtle transformation towards the older Strange of Inspector Morse as played by the wonderful James Grout?

RUSS: All credit to Riggers. He has never put a foot wrong. Such a fine, fine actor. One of the great joys of the job has been watching him unfurl his sail of greatness.  

DAMIAN: Do you think that it is precisely because they’re ‘respected friends and colleagues’ that both Strange and Max dared to speak to Endeavour and particularly Thursday like that?

RUSS: Completely. Let’s not forget DEGUELLO (S6:E4). These are men who have taken it to the wire together. Cowley men – first and last. United against a common enemy, they proved themselves undefeatable. But a house divided against itself…

DAMIAN: Thursday spends some quality time with his canaries as he whistles to them – what with this and the Towpath Killer suspects, there’s more whistling in series seven than a Roger Whittaker concert – and the birds chirp back but then a cat walks into the room which prompts him to warn, ‘Get out of it! Before you get my toe up your arse.’ Remembering where he told Win that he was going to keep the birds and many other utterances throughout the years, Thursday seems to have a fixation with bottoms! Anyway, first of all, when did the Thursdays get a cat?

RUSS: Not theirs. Cats have a habit of wandering in from the garden. Arse and particularly arseholes seem to have had great currency with those who had served in the war. Was it Milligan, I read about — one of that group of comedians and entertainers that’d come through the war, anyway — saying that all you needed to be a big hit with an audience of soldiers at a concert party was to come on stage and say ‘arseholes’.  

You’ll remember the serviceman’s lyric to Colonel Bogey’s March was ‘Arseholes! And the same to you!’

DAMIAN: And secondly, was this a play on the predator and prey theme again as it was intercut with the scene where Endeavour talks to Jenny Tate about her dreams and visions?

RUSS: Cat and canary.

DAMIAN: After he sees the copious crucifixes, Bible pages and the black painted silhouette of a wolf on the walls of her home, Endeavour is listening to Jenny tell him about her childhood including the memory of playing hide and seek with her cousin who had a particular fondness for necks, ‘He’d hold you down and pin a big, fat, wet raspberry on your neck. Making out it was all a big joke and a game’ and that she hid in her aunt’s wardrobe once, ‘all fur coats and that. Stoles, you call them? Things made out to look like foxes or some other animal. Their paws hanging down and glass eyes on wire. There was this handbag smell, all stale. Perfume and lipstick and old sweets, all mixed up with mints and cigarettes.’ You often say it’s funny the things that you remember and I continue to be fascinated with the way in which you skilfully interweave your own personal memories with twists on popular culture to create such evocative and resonate dramatic sequences.

The game of hide and seek in a wardrobe filled with fur coats obviously reminds one of The Lion, Witch and the Wardrobe – not to mention the White Witch’s wolf who is head of her secret police –  but there’s more; Jenny says of being trapped in the wardrobe that she ‘screamed and screamed and screamed, till I was gasping.’ Now this may be a bit of a stretch  – and I may be overthinking again – but you mentioned Scream and Scream Again in one of our previous interviews but if the repetition of screams were not enough, the 1970 horror film also just happens to be about a serial killer who drains his victims’ blood! Also, last time, since you vividly recalled the childhood trips to the bingo hall as a kid, is the stale handbag, perfume, lipstick, mints and cigarettes how you remember the old ladies smelling?

RUSS: Jenny’s story – for the most part – is a memory. I slept in the attic when I was a boy, (eventually with half a dozen canaries) and the old man had built – built-in wardrobes across the length of the wall. Three sets of double doors. But inside, there was no divider between each notional wardrobe. So you could enter via door one and travel the length of the thing inside to emerge at door three – or door six if you’re counting each door leaf as a single. It was the place that clothes went to die. When I was put to bed, there was no night light. The place was as black as pitch — you truly couldn’t see a hand in front of your face. I remember hearing voices — I must have been very small – three or four – maybe? – and I got out of bed to try to find the door to come downstairs. And in the dark I lost my bearings. I entered the wardrobe via one door and before I knew it was lost in its be-furred and cavernous interior, and I couldn’t find my way out. It was clearly traumatic enough for me to remember vividly half a century later.

DAMIAN: I’ll be tempted to slip Aconitum into your orange juice when it’s my next round if you say no to either of the following questions! Firstly, The Wolf’s Head pub sign absolutely MUST be a wee nodette to The Slaughtered Lamb from An American Werewolf in London (1981)?

RUSS:  Yup.

‘An American Werewolf in London’
And the pub sign in ZENANA. Graphic design by Gavin Lines

DAMIAN: And the handle of the sword cane which Strange gets stabbed with is obviously supposed to be similar to the one Claude Rains uses to kill Lon Chaney Jr in The Wolf Man (1941)?

RUSS: Yes — the head at least.

There was a bit of Murder By Decree (1979) with the sword-stick too — presumably, meant to be Spivey, if one’s keeping to the much discredited Stephen Knight solution.

The finale was originally conceived as a nod to the famous final battle between Lee and Cushing in the ‘58 Dracula — the Douglas Fairbanks leap from the refectory table, and all the rest of it. I think we also nodded to the end of Risen from the Grave (1968), as well.  But that particular incarnation of the ending did not meet with Universal – or even Hammer – enthusiasm.

DAMIAN: All-time favourite werewolf movie?

RUSS: That’s tough — but it’s probably got to be American Werewolf in London — if only for La Agutter. But there’s also John Woodvine, Brian Glover… and a very young Rik Mayall to enjoy. And it’s a London that’s much gone. The London of my salad days. Well — salad dodger days at least.

Feeding time with Jenny Agutter in ‘An American Werewolf in London’

DAMIAN: Immediately after the Strange stabbing, Thursday is dismissive of Endeavour’s theory regarding the true identity of Sturgis and the mental connection Jenny may have had with him. Thursday then asks when he starts at Kidlington under McNutt and after telling him, he just walks away in silence and gets into the car with his new bagman, Siddle, leaving Endeavour standing alone looking absolutely devastated. I know that I’ve probably asked you variations on this question before but in that moment, does his expression illustrate the loss of a friend, a respected colleague or a parental figure who showed Endeavour more kindness and caring than his own father ever did?

RUSS: All of that, I would imagine. You’d need to ask Shaun.

DAMIAN: Regardless of whatever might have come later, Thursday is cruel at that very moment isn’t he?

RUSS: I think they probably both felt things had come to the end of the road. But I think that’s the nature of their relationship. They might fight and hurt each other – but when the chips are down… At least, that’s always been the way so far.

DAMIAN: And again in that very moment, having been manipulated, betrayed and rejected by Violetta, Endeavour is completely alone isn’t he?

RUSS: He has failed — utterly. He has been gulled.

DAMIAN: I don’t know if it’s your skill as a writer or the strength of the performances – possibly both, of course – but isn’t it interesting how the audience’s sympathies with various characters might have shifted throughout the years. Certainly, as I’ve told you before, I was surprised by the way he’s treated Strange in the past and most especially the appalling way in which he tried to hurt Joan with his snooty attitude and condescending words. Indeed, as Thursday says in this episode, ‘you look down your nose at everyone’ and ‘nobody’s good enough’. However, in this story at least, my sympathies firmly lie with Endeavour.

RUSS: I think you and Thursday have a point. I think we were just drawing on those less agreeable aspects of the later Morse’s character. The things that tested the patience and innate decency of Robbie Lewis. Morse as a Detective Chief Inspector could be pretty lacerating. The withering, belittling phrase was never far from his lips. The finer things in life — the opera, the jag, the intellectual comforts – those things are his armour, aren’t they? They’re what stand in place of a meaningful emotional connection with another human being. They give him comfort and protection. So – he has the idealised and intellectualised love of high art, rather than the infinitely more messy real thing.  We’re watching him bolt that armour on.

DAMIAN: In addition to this, of course, the audience has had to endure another agonising scene to watch concerning the death of Mrs Bright. Let’s remind ourselves of the final moments with her and her husband…

MRS BRIGHT: What a very smart man I married. You look terribly dashing.
BRIGHT: My dear, you were never lovelier.
MRS BRIGHT: Oh, I think I was.
BRIGHT: Not to me. And I should know.
MRS BRIGHT: I’m very proud of you, Puli. You’ve taken care of me so well this past year, these past years. You’ve always looked after me.
BRIGHT: And I always shall.
They kiss and he leaves her.

‘And I always shall…’ Heart-breaking. I know you would have introduced his wife much sooner if you had the screen time but for how long did you know that Mr Bright would become a widower?

RUSS: Um… Well, it needed to be its own thing. Its own story. And not just a slightly posher version of the Thursdays’ domestic scenes. So — sadly, it was always going that way.

DAMIAN: When I last interviewed Mr Lesser he told me that he had a discussion with the director, Kate Saxon, in which he confessed that he didn’t know how to play the scene where Thursday tells Bright his wife has died in the supposed accident. Isn’t that remarkable given the absolute power of his performance in the film?

RUSS: I didn’t know that. Unsurprisingly, Kate and Anton found the way to it. Anton has never been less than an absolute wonder across these films. And – let’s be honest – in everything he’s ever done. One of the many bits of great good fortune that befell Endeavour is getting Anton to come and work with us. Every scene is just a joy to behold. This year, alas – due to the demands of his presence in another place – our time with him has been much limited. But one treasures every second.

DAMIAN: It’s funny the things that you remember, but when I first rang Mr Lesser for an interview, it took him a while to answer and he apologised saying something like the phone was at the other end of the house – I honestly think he may have even said it was in the hall. Now, just compare this to the following dialogue when Bright is in denial, can’t accept his wife’s death and tells Thursday that he’s going to ring her to prove she’s still alive: ‘It just takes her a while to get to the phone, you see. It’s quite a way from, erm, from one part of the house to the hall. That’s where we keep the instrument.’ Is this a remarkable coincidence or did you base this on your own phone calls to Mr Lesser?

RUSS: It’s a remarkable coincidence, I promise you.  

DAMIAN: And possibly even more agonising to watch than the aforementioned was the one where – despite Thursday’s best efforts – Endeavour tries to tell Bright that it was no accident and his wife died deliberately at the hands of Ludo for the insurance money.

Leicester
Uttoxeter
Dover
Oxford

Would you agree that Endeavour has become increasingly darker over the years but this was probably the darkest series yet?

RUSS: As above, so below.

Graphic design by Gavin Lines

DAMIAN: Let’s move onto the grand finale! In your wildest dreams, did you ever think that you would be writing a libretto to an opera?

RUSS: Ha! Well — it’s been the most marvellous sandpit to play in. The wonderful thing about the show has been – for the most part – if you can imagine it, you can do it. I would very much have liked to do a Promised Land, fish out of water story — but I think that’s about the one thing that turned out to be beyond our resources.

DAMIAN: Even after you’d finished the libretto with the help of Nicolo Rosetti’s translation, did you ever imagine it would sound so spectacular on screen?

RUSS: Well — Matt’s never come up short. He doesn’t know how to fail. But I think it’s pretty spectacular, even by his extraordinarily high standards.

DAMIAN: I know it’s something you’ve tried your hand at but whose idea was it for Matthew to make his cameo appearance as the conductor of the opera?

RUSS: I’d talked about the John Barry cameo as the conductor in Deadfall (1968). So – I’d always thought it would be lovely if we could get Matt to appear. We shot a lot more than was used. Maybe when we do the Director’s Cut.

John Barry in ‘Deadfall’
He also appeared in his last Bond film, ‘The Living Daylights’

DAMIAN: Where were the opera house scenes filmed?

RUSS: La Fenice. A.k.a. Wimbledon Theatre. My only day on set that year, I think.

DAMIAN: And what was actually filmed in Venice?

RUSS: Mmm. This probably sounds flippant, but it really isn’t — the bits that are obviously Venice. All else was sleight of hand. Budget only allowed us to send Shaun and the most skeleton of crews. Real guerrilla stuff. So — what Kate did in FILM 3 was quite incredible. Miraculous, in fact.

DAMIAN: We’ve talked about The Godfather (1972) before but was the juxtaposition of the opera scenes with the shooting and death of Violetta inspired by the climax of the third part of Francis Ford Coppola’s trilogy (1990)?

RUSS: Well — that all took place in the opera house and on the steps. I knew I always wanted it to end on the Isola di San Michele — the Island Cemetery. 

Death in Venice (1971) was the jumping off point for everything. As a notion – rather than literally.

It felt climactic – La Boheme; Traviata… the doomed heroine. It was also a bit of a salute to the great Baz Luhrmann.  

DAMIAN: Violetta tells Endeavour that she is sorry and that she loves him but did he really love her and, if so, how might this love compare to his feelings for Joan?

RUSS: I think he was absolutely beguiled. The Grand Passion. I think it was all about the new decade. He’d decided to try to be somebody else. To say yes where he’d usually say no. To be a new person. And that turned out well. Another life lesson.

DAMIAN: God knows – along with attempting to discover the identity of the Wednesday sandwich – I’ve tried in the past but I know you’ll never tell me which Endeavour you consider to be the best or pick a favourite but might you concede that ZENANA deserves a place in the top ten at least?

RUSS: Well — that’s very kind of you to say. Honestly, I’m no judge. I like bits of all of them, I suppose. I guess that’s the challenge of having so many regular characters — you might think that such and such a film was great for Max or Dorothea or Bright or Win… or Strange or… and so on.   

DAMIAN: After all these years and episodes, I wonder if it becomes easier to write the scripts but more difficult to actually film them?

RUSS: The process has probably got more challenging year on year. Shaun and Rog have never wanted to tread water. They’re not interested in just doing a straight whodunit. Ever. So – that’s always a challenge. Everything has to come from or impact upon their characters. Rog likes something he can get his teeth into, that lets him stretch his muscles emotionally. Shaun – it’s all about the journey that Endeavour’s on.  So — each series, outside of putting together 3, 4 or half a dozen Agatha Christie style whodunits — you’ve also got to take care of business on that front. You’ve got ‘Notes’ coming from about half a dozen  places. The Network, the Mammoths, Shaun and Rog, the Director, Compliance… They’ll all typically have their own preoccupations, some of which will align, some of which will contradict and compete with each other for primacy —  and if you want a happy ship, you’ve got to chart a careful course that addresses and resolves everyone’s concerns.

An innocent might be forgiven for thinking that writing a TV show is primarily about writing, but the job is – or, at least, has become – as much about squaring circles as anything else. Squaring circles and solving problems with as much elegance and economy as thirty odd years before the mast has taught you. The material you have at your disposal for this task is 26 letters of the alphabet in infinite combinations and a bit of punctuation. So.

DAMIAN: I know it won’t be much, but please tell us something about the final film with the ominous title of TERMINUS.

RUSS: Mmm. It became something other than it started out. But Kate Saxon returns, which is always a good thing. And she worked her own brand of magic on it.

DAMIAN: Well, we all have our entrances and our exits and I’m afraid we’ve come to the end. The end of our little chinwags but is it also the end of Endeavour?

RUSS: You’ll know the answer to some part of that question this evening.

DAMIAN: Russ, there’s never the time to say all that one would wish but you are the best and wisest of men, thanks for this and all the other interviews over the years.

RUSS: Oh – stop, now. Been a pleasure. Thanks for all of it.

~~~

CURTAIN

~

Interview copyright © Damian Michael Barcroft 2021

THE ENDEAVOUR INTERVIEWS 2021: SARA VICKERS

Interview copyright © Damian Michael Barcroft 2021

DAMIAN: Sara, I think I speak for many fans of Endeavour when I say that you were really missed during Joan’s secondment. How are you doing?

SARA: I’m doing really well. Life has changed a bit since we last spoke. I now have a little boy. He’s just turned two, full of fun and giggles and I couldn’t be prouder to be his mummy. I certainly missed my Endeavour family. Especially as I went overdue and was sat at home twiddling my thumbs while episode one was getting underway! But everyone sent lots of well wishes and they were always checking up to see how things were progressing.

DAMIAN: Did you still watch the last series even though you didn’t appear, and if so, how did it feel not to have been a part of it?

SARA: Hell yes! Wouldn’t have missed it. I actually loved not knowing the story, I got the full audience experience. It was definitely weird not to have been a part of it but it was heart warming to see her mentioned throughout the series. I guess the Thursdays are just integral to the fabric of the show.

DAMIAN: Dare I ask what you thought of the Violetta Talenti character?

SARA: I thought she was beautifully portrayed by Stephanie Leonidas. Sassy, untamed and passionate. Endeavour certainly had his hands full. I think she fulfilled his desire for something out of the ordinary. The dangerous, passionate affairs that rarely end well.

ZANANA (S7:E3)

DAMIAN: I certainly had much more sympathy for Violetta than Claudine from series five who I didn’t like at all. What are your thoughts about her?

SARA: I guess Claudine had a coolness about her. An air of sophistication that was a good match for Morse’s intellect. But she was clearly more ambitious about her work than her affair with Endeavour. I think perhaps Claudine didn’t capture your sympathy as her motives remained a little more of an enigma. Perhaps she fell victim to the fact that this is primarily a detective show so not all of the characters get the airtime to flesh out the whys of their actions.

Still falls the rain. COLOURS (S5:E4)

DAMIAN: It’s frustrating because we’ll never know for sure but to what extent do you think series seven might have turned out very differently had Joan stuck around?

SARA: That’s an interesting one. I reckon Jim and Joan’s Masonic ball may have made an earlier appearance and perhaps we may have seen the repercussions of that by now? But your guess is as good as mine.

There have been a number of scenes between Joan and Strange over the years that were not filmed due to either time constraints or actor availability. Thankfully, this lovely moment from COLOURS (S5:E4) made the cut.

SARA: Russ said he had plans for more political activism, women’s rights in particular. Also, perhaps the Morse and Violetta storyline wouldn’t have been able to grow and progress to the extent it did had Joan been on the scene. She may have muddied the waters a little. Her absence definitely gave Russ license to let Endeavour wander in a different direction.

DAMIAN: Over the last two weeks I’ve been posting my interviews with Russ and I was absolutely astonished that so many people on Twitter were commenting and coming up with their own theories about why Endeavour treats Joan the way he does. Isn’t it a wonderful testament to Russ’ writing and your performance that people care so deeply about Joan?

SARA: I am always so thrilled when people are rooting for Joan. I know people weren’t best pleased when she ran away from home. But hopefully she has made amends. When people empathise with her I feel like I’ve done my job, they get her. It’s not something you can set out to achieve, but if Russ and I have managed to get the audience to care, that’s the biggest achievement.

Their first goodbye. CODA (S3:E4)

DAMIAN: I think that one of the reasons Endeavour is such a great show is undoubtedly because Russ cares so much about all the characters and not just Endeavour and Thursday. Furthermore – wonderfully tender-hearted and magnanimous man that he is – Russ has said to me on numerous occasions that he is deeply invested in Joan’s journey but when I asked him about the character’s absence, it was obvious that he also cares deeply about the actors as well when he replied with the following:

‘I love writing for Sara. Loved what she did with Joan right from the off. She’s a fantastically sensitive and thoughtful actor. Everything you care about with Joan, you care about because of Sara. Her extraordinary skill and talent. She has to do and convey so much with great economy. But, yes — I am deeply invested in Joan’s character and story. I’ve loved what we’ve been able to do with her. It feels like she’s been on a long and often painful journey of self-discovery.’

DAMIAN: Isn’t that a lovely thing of Russ to say?

SARA: It’s so nice to hear this. Russ has written so many wonderful twists and turns into Joan’s life since we first met her. I think he hits the nail on the head with ‘painful journey of self-discovery’. She hasn’t had it easy. She’s had to navigate her way through a myriad of challenges and has still – just about – managed to find her feet.

Endeavour meets Miss Thursday for the first time in FUGUE (S1:E2)

DAMIAN: I also thought it was an excellent point that Russ makes about economy because the show is a detective series at the end of the day as you’ve said and so – rather regrettably at times – there isn’t always the room to explore all the psychology and motivation of each and every character. Therefore, I wondered if you were ever aware of this on set or felt an added pressure that you have to emote so much with relatively little screen time?

SARA: It is always more tricky coming in for smaller sections of filming, that’s the case for any job. The audience don’t spend as much time with Joan as they do Thursday or Endeavour, so you can feel a little pressure to state your case, so to speak. But this is something you actively have to fight against. You can’t give into the pressure of demonstration. Audiences are very astute at picking up characters’ thoughts and feelings even in just a look. It’s important to stay as truthful as possible and trust that what is captured tells the story.

‘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)

DAMIAN: Again from my recent interviews with Russ, I’ve got another couple of quotes from him that I’d like to hear your opinion on with regards to why his relationships with Susan, Claudine, Violetta, and Joan always seem destined to end so unhappily:

‘Emotionally, at least, he is drawn to self-destruction. He’s a romantic, for whom love has to be indistinguishable from suffering. Small wonder given his personal history. Arrested development. He is forever reaching for the perfect/idealised woman — because the woman he idealised escaped him when he was twelve. So – one might argue, he sets his heart upon the unattainable, because there is comfort in the predictability of disappointment.’

‘Susan was too early. Claudine was never going the distance. Joan… He imagines declaring his feelings for Joan would be in some way being disloyal, and in some respect betraying the trust Thursday and by extension the family have placed in him.’

Morse River…
…Breakfast at Thursdays
“Oh, dream maker, you heart breaker” FUGUE (S1:E2)

DAMIAN: What’s your take on this, particularly the bit about Endeavour being disloyal or betraying the trust of the Thursday family?

SARA: I think this is a very interesting reading of the situation and explains a lot. There is definitely an element of not wanting to disappoint and betray. But can you imagine if they did get together? Fred and Win would be delighted, I’m sure. I think for Endeavour, this idea of betrayal is a convenient road block. He can then happily keep travelling down the road of self sabotage.

Coffee? ICARUS (S5:E6)

Russ, Shaun and I had a conversation before filming the new series. We joked about Endeavour and Joan going to get the weekly shop on a Sunday. We weren’t sure we could picture it. And it got me thinking, why? Well, perhaps Endeavour needs his love to be grand and messy. Operatic. Marriages aren’t like operas – thank God! They involve a lot of the mundane. Perhaps he can’t allow himself to give up the drama and the heartache. He could never give Joan the life she would want – marriage, kids – so to go there would always spell disaster.

DAMIAN: I suppose we’re back to the whole ‘if he can’t have her, he must hurt her’ thing that we discussed in our previous interview and as Thursday said of Endeavour at the end of series seven, ‘you look down your nose at everyone’ and ‘nobody’s good enough’. When you and Shaun talk through a scene before a take – particularly perhaps when he’s also directing – are there ever any concerns about making Endeavour just a little bit too mean and unlikable?

SARA: We both welcome the gritty exchanges that they share with each other. It shows things have evolved. Hurting the ones you love and all that. I think Joan knows it’s just another layer of armour, but nevertheless they can be very nasty and condescending. We always hope that in doing a scene that gets a little fiery, people can read the subtext, the hurt and longing. And no one is perfect. I think Shaun likes to embrace the uglier sides of Endeavour.

ZANANA (S7:E3)

DAMIAN: Wasn’t it interesting that when he wrote that letter at the end of the last series about proving Ludo was responsible for the “freak accidents” – including, of course, Bright’s wife – that after burning all his bridges with everyone else, Joan was the last and only person Endeavour could turn to?

SARA: I had no idea that was coming. I definitely got a lump in my throat and wanted to scream at the TV, “find her and declare your love!”. It made me think, Joan is his constant. Ever there, ever reliable and would be able to see past whatever difficult situation he found himself. I guess there is a strength in Joan that he feels he is able to lean on when everything else crumbles away. And I feel proud of that deep unshakable relationship we have been forging over the last decade.

DAMIAN: Sara, it’s always lovely to hear your thoughts on Joan – thank you so much.

SARA: A pleasure, as always.

Interview copyright © Damian Michael Barcroft 2021

THE ENDEAVOUR INTERVIEWS 2021: GAVIN LINES

Interview copyright © Damian Michael Barcroft 2021

All images by Gavin Lines copyright © 2000

Endeavour copyright © Mammoth Screen ©2000/21

DAMIAN: What images do you have hanging on your office wall to inspire you?

GAVIN: I certainly have a taste for graphic design of the 1950s and ’60s. I have a number of posters and prints from this era – railway and holiday posters on the wall, as well as some product adverts. Along with some artefacts as well, I have an old chocolate vending machine that would have been seen on station platforms, which is my pride and joy.

DAMIAN: How old were you when someone first noticed your talent for art?

GAVIN: Well, I’ve always drawn – growing up, my parents would have said that a pencil and paper would be the easiest way to keep me quiet. I think my first recognition would have been a poster I did for the school library in middle school at about age 10, that won me a book token for my efforts.

DAMIAN: What sort of things did you enjoy drawing as a child and in your teenage years?

GAVIN: All kinds of things really, I enjoyed drawing comic strips. In my teenage years, I was able to experiment with my brother’s home computer to create illustrations digitally for the first time, some quite elaborate images which were created in a basic 4 colour 8-bit style. This early introduction to digital art really helped me grow in confidence using computers and it’s seen me well over the years.

DAMIAN: At what point did you seriously start to consider pursuing a career as an artist?

GAVIN: In my late teens and early 20s I worked in archaeology. Drawing plans and elevations of site features. This was my career for a number of years, but I would often catch myself sketching the landscapes and people in the margins of the plans. So I enrolled at art school and studied graphic design and animation at university in Bristol and never looked back.

DAMIAN: You’ve worked in illustration, print and promotion, animation, as well as live action film and television projects. What was the first piece of graphic design or illustration that you were paid for as a professional?

GAVIN: After graduating from UWE in Bristol, I moved to London looking for work in animation, it was whilst I was there that I had the opportunity to submit drawings as a pitch to be illustrator for Bob the Builder books and magazines. It was this which afforded me the chance to again create art digitally. Over the years I illustrated a number of books for BBC Children’s publishing as well as some for Random House and others as well as illustrations for children’s magazines.

DAMIAN: For a layman such as myself, can you explain what it is you do in film and television and what the difference might be between a graphic artist and graphic designer?

GAVIN:  Graphic designers for film and TV, are tasked with creating the print and often digital elements needed for a show. That can range from newspapers, books, magazines, posters, any letters or paperwork needed. It can also be maps, photographs, product packaging, signage and many other requirements including screen graphics. We can also be required to generate paintings and artwork and I’ve created patterned wallpaper and carpets. If I’m being credited as a graphic artist it’s usually because more illustration has been required in the role.

DAMIAN: Wallace & Gromit, Shaun the Sheep, Creature Comforts, Early Man, The Pirates, and Flushed Away; would you say that your skills are particularly well-suited to animation or do you have a strong working relationship with Aardman?

GAVIN: Each project presents its own challenges, working in animation I get to do more illustration and I do get to employ my funny bone. But the role of graphic designer on any show is much the same, it’s the show which sets the style and I approach each project individually. I’ve worked with Aardman for over twenty years now, on many varied projects and I have a talent for humour which is well suited.

DAMIAN: I’m not suggesting it’s necessarily a case of either or but is your priority as a graphic artist to make the objects authentic for the actors to react to as a stimulus on set while filming – including, of course, our plasticine friends – or the audience watching at home who perhaps won’t even appreciate that all the items you mentioned need to be designed and then actually made?

GAVIN: A lot of the graphics the audience shouldn’t give a second thought, the work shouldn’t stand out, it’s part of the immersion of the show. I do hope the actors find the graphics helpful in a scene, many letters and documents which have been created, won’t even be seen by the audience, but if they can help performance in any way, then they have been very successful. Some of the work is for hero props and to be featured prominently, then it’s nice to think that people notice. In animation projects, everything is created from scratch, so I try to make it all funny where I can, if it gets a laugh, when that’s very rewarding.

DAMIAN: Your work for live action television includes such hits as Broadchurch, Poldark and, of course, Endeavour. To what extent do you think that potential clients looking at your portfolio or website ( gavinlines.com ) might be more impressed – and thus obviously more likely to commission you – with the prestigious projects you’ve previously worked on as opposed to the actual merits of the graphics themselves?

GAVIN: A production designer needs to know you can do the work, on time and in budget, work examples and experience shows that you can do that. I think both in equal measure would get the job. I could come up with designs, but without experience on a show, a producer or designer wouldn’t know if you could perform when needed.

DAMIAN: How did you get the job on Endeavour?

GAVIN: Madelaine Leech – production designer – and I have mutual friends and she got in contact through a recommendation. We hit it off straight away and it’s been amazing working with her on a number of shows, she’s a source of constant support and inspiration.

DAMIAN: Can you remember the first piece of graphic design you did on Endeavour and which episode it appeared in?

GAVIN: During the prep period for the series it’s an opportunity to generate graphics for things you know you’ll need. So I will be designing useful items first of all, cigarette packets, bottle labels, even car tax discs are good to get going on. My first real prop design however was Endeavour’s postcard to Thursday, from Venice, in the opening of ORACLE (S7:E1). That was a nice thing to kick off with and I had an opportunity to get Shaun to write the message on it too.

DAMIAN: Obviously both Poldark and Endeavour are set in the past, do you think it is more challenging to work on period as opposed to contemporary productions in terms of the research process?

GAVIN: It can be challenging, but there is a wealth of reference for period shows. That can be from books or internet sources. Also visiting museums and libraries are essential. For contemporary shows, research can be somewhat easier because we are surrounded with reference.

DAMIAN: How much time might you spend on research as opposed to actually designing and then physically creating the objects?

GAVIN: At the start of a show there’s more opportunity for research and to source assets, such as gathering suitable paper stock for a period show. When we’re in the thick of shooting there’s more limited time, but it’s good to be prepared. I still like to spend a couple of hours on research before designing the prop.

DAMIAN: I know from my past interviews with people who have worked on Endeavour – for example, production and costume designers – that they often refer to a particular set of books or magazines in their collection which help with the visual aesthetics associated with the ‘60s or ‘70s. Do you have at least one well-thumbed bible that has proved particularly useful during series 7 and 8?

GAVIN: Robert Opie’s decade based scrapbooks are very useful and have been a constant source of reference over the years. The wealth of examples of products and other graphics in them is invaluable. Also being based in Bristol, I’m blessed with being close to ‘Oakham Treasures’ in Portbury. They have a large and varied collection of historical signs, products and advertising held there which is an incredible resource for a graphic designer. It’s somewhere I go to immerse myself before each job.

DAMIAN: Does your work typically begin with discussions with Russ, the producers and directors or do you receive the script first?

GAVIN: I will receive the script, which is then broken down and any graphics that are required are highlighted, be it hero items or what might be needed for dressing in locations. Sometime after that there’ll be a read through in the company of the director, designer, art directors and other art department members. This is when we get to bring up any queries and get a brief from the director on what they would like to see.

DAMIAN: To what extent do you collaborate with other departments such as production design for example?

GAVIN: Alice, who assists me, and I are part of the art department, so we’ll collaborate with all members of the team. I work closely with Madelaine and defer to her vision. We’ll also have a lot of contact with the script editors and also the legal and clearance departments, it’s a collaborative process and there’s a lot of factors. I also may have to work with the costume department if they require any graphics as part of their process.

DAMIAN: I’ve always wondered when there is a close-up of a newspaper or magazine article and while the audience only sees it for a few seconds and can’t actually read it all, you still have to produce the complete article. Well, how do you know what to actually write and be sure that the text doesn’t contradict the plot of not only that episode but also possibly past or future storylines?

GAVIN: Here again I’ll work closely with Charlotte and Uju, the script editors, from who I’ll request the copy for the articles in the newspapers. They work with Russ to make sure that any dates and details on graphic props line up with the story and timeline. 

DAMIAN: Do you ever slip in names of people only you or other members of the cast and crew would know into such articles or props

GAVIN: I personally don’t tend to do that but that’s certainly happened, names on noticeboards and on forms for example. There is a procedure to follow with using names on the graphics. Everything will have to be checked with the compliance guidelines and there may be issues with names matching real people. So anything created will have to go through the clearance process. 

DAMIAN: You mentioned Shaun’s handwriting on the postcard from Venice earlier but who usually writes all the signatures for Endeavour or Thursday on props such as letters or police files?

GAVIN: For recurring characters such as the heroes, we’ll get the actors to sign forms or any handwriting needed, that keeps a consistency through the shows. If the documents are from side characters and they aren’t portrayed as signing them, then it’s easier to do that ourselves.

DAMIAN: It’s a tough job but someone’s gotta do it I suppose, was it particularly challenging researching the covers you designed for magazines such as ‘Rowdy Girls’ (ORACLE) and ‘Wild Erotica’ (RAGA)?

GAVIN: Ha, a tough challenge for sure. There’s plenty of reference out there of course, online etc. For ‘Rowdy Girls’ I did pick up a vintage copy of ‘Parade’ for reference into the size and paper stock to create an authentic prop. As with most things there will be a clearance process for the graphics – making sure the magazine names don’t infringe on any copyright for example – and of course the images must comply with Ofcom broadcast regulations regarding the watershed. Stock image sites are useful for getting period images to use. There’s a limit to what’s available and sometimes you can recognise images on other show’s graphics, that I’ve also used myself.

DAMIAN: One of the supporting cover lines on ‘Wild Erotica’ reads “Kinky Diaries of Wayward Ladies”, I’m wondering who came up with this because “wayward” sounds like a word Russ would use?

GAVIN: That would have been me in that particular case. Russ often adds lines like that in the script description, but he is immensely busy and we don’t want to bother him all the time for such things. I’m sure he would have thought of many more of them though.

DAMIAN: Well I’m sure Morse, particularly his older incarnation would approve. Anyway, tell me about the creation of ‘The Cure for Love’ opera poster and programme, did you look at old artwork from Venice or just the period more generally associated with baroque?

GAVIN: I looked at contemporary opera posters and ephemera for research, having the plot of the opera helped with creating the imagery. The poster image was created digitally, it’s much quicker for me to work in this way, there wasn’t a lot of time to generate the dressing graphics for the opera house and consideration into how detailed it would be seen is a factor when deciding how much time to dedicate on them.

DAMIAN: I know Russ is something of a horror connoisseur, The Wolf’s Head pub sign must be inspired by The Slaughtered Lamb from An American Werewolf in London

GAVIN: Of course, it was described in detail in the script, so I used the original film’s sign as a start point. Again, I initially illustrated it digitally, this time it was printed full size, mounted onto a board and overpainted for the final piece.

DAMIAN: Tell me about some of the other wolf and horror imagery such as the Jenny paintings, was there a particular mood board that you and the director, Kate Saxon, were working from?

GAVIN: Kate is very visual and had a detailed brief for what she wanted to see. I did a series of illustrations as suggestions for Jenny’s wolf painting, from which she chose preferred options and gave notes, this was then handed over to Ida in the art department who took it on and created the artwork for the set.

DAMIAN: And what about the beautiful Colin Dexter portrait featured in ZENANA?

GAVIN: Creating portraits is something I always relish doing, so when there was a suggestion for a Colin portrait I was happy to jump at the chance. It was again created digitally and this time printed onto canvas and varnished for the frame.

DAMIAN: What’s the most challenging graphic you created for the latest series of Endeavour?

GAVIN: Maps are always challenging and time consuming, especially if they are referring to fictional places. Oxford maps have to be elaborated on and often manipulated to include the scripted details. Another challenge are the newspapers, there are a number of editions of the ‘Oxford Mail’ in each film and all the information we are given is for the hero articles only, but each paper needs to have a complete front and rear cover created, so that’s a lot of additional copy and images to place in the layout, along with period advertising to put on there also, to have them look authentic. This all has to be checked and cleared with compliance so there aren’t any issues with copyright or existing people.

DAMIAN: I’ve actually seen where they keep all the old props from previous episodes and I remember thinking “this belongs in a museum” as Indiana Jones might say. I know you would never do this – and, of course, neither did I – but if you could take just one item home with you when no one was looking, what would it be?

GAVIN: Can I have one of the cars? Definitely the cars, I’d take a car… hypothetically of course…

DAMIAN: You take the car and I’ll take the Calloway LP. Gavin, thank you very much indeed.

GAVIN: Thank you Damian, it’s been a pleasure.

~

More information and images from Gavin Lines can be found on his website: gavinlines.com

Interview copyright © Damian Michael Barcroft 2021

THE ENDEAVOUR INTERVIEWS 2021: RUSSELL LEWIS PART II

Interview copyright © Damian Michael Barcroft 2021

DAMIAN: I know it’s something to do with Indian music but why did you specifically choose to title this film RAGA?

RUSS: We always try to include a musical title across the run. And, given the Indian flavour of the story, RAGA – a central feature of Indian classical music – felt fitting.

DAMIAN: And was naming the Indian restaurant “The Jolly Rajah” simply a play on Jolly Roger, or more in reference to the great Mr Allam?

RUSS: A play on Jolly Roger, obviously — but also nodding to The British Raj. It was originally called something else — but it’ll keep.

Graphic design by Gavin Lines

DAMIAN: RAGA opens with the The Jolly Rajah cinema advert which I thought was very evocative of the sort of crap adverts I remember watching before a film started during the 70s, 80s and even 90s – they never seemed to evolve very much did they?

RUSS: I’m of an age where I look back on them with huge fondness and find them immensely comforting. The reason they never evolved may have been economic, but there was something about their made for tuppence sensibility and ‘just five minutes from this cinema’ that’s incredibly endearing. I rather liked that world from which they came. And it should be remembered that it wasn’t just Indian restaurant ads that looked like this. Pretty much all ‘local business’ ads had something of this flavour. 

DAMIAN: Were you one of the boys who purchased refreshments during the adverts and trailers or – like my family who were always on a tight budget in those days – from Woolworths beforehand?

RUSS: Do you mean from the usherette? I went to the pictures rarely as a kid with the family. But I think selections were made for the most part from the ‘concessions’ counter before going into the cinema itself. If I remember correctly. Sometimes from the usherette. We covered a fair bit of this in CARTOUCHE (S5:E2).

DAMIAN: Again, very evocative, the wrestling scenes reminded me of Saturday afternoons round my great grandparents. My mum had me when she was very young so I was lucky enough to know them and my great nan, Gladys – who was a small, frail and ever so gently spoken old lady – absolutely adored watching big sweaty men jump all over each other in colourful leotards. In my day it was Big Daddy and Giant Haystacks, who do you remember?

RUSS: It was the closest thing we had to a religion in our house. How long have you got? Les Kellett; Kendo Nagasaki; Adrian Street, and Bobby Barnes (as glam tag team Hell’s Angels); Jackie Pallo; Mick McManus – (legend has it that Pallo and McManus used to knock about with one or two family members back in the mists of time – but who knows? – nobody left alive to ask now) – the Royal Brothers – Bert Royal and Vic Faulkner; Honey Boy Zimba; Johnny Kwango.

Graphic design by Gavin Lines

Likewise — my diminutive Northern grandmother was a vocal devotee of the grapple game. I’ve half a mind we went along to the Town Hall once to watch it. We certainly went along to the Bingo often enough. My principal recollection of the latter is cigarette smoke. A large, windowless room filled with two-hundred or more women — pretty much all of whom were smoking for Britain. Literally, eye watering. Cinemas, of course — had that same tobacco smoke haze. My one regret about the Wrestling sequence is that we lost a bit of the great Ted Robbins for reasons of length.

DAMIAN: Incidentally, my great grandad, Joe, lost an eye in the war and would only wear his glass eye on special occasions like a wedding or suchlike. So, for the rest of time, he kept it in a cup of water on the sink next to the toilet and I always had the creepy sensation that I was being watched when I went to the bathroom. Anyway, speaking of families, the Allams have invaded and taken everyone’s job as one of the more unsavoury characters in RAGA might phrase it. In addition to Roger, we not only have his wife, Rebecca Saire returning in her role from COLOURS (S5:E4), but also their son, William, as Gary Rogers/Radowicz. You told me last time that you had nothing to do with casting Abigail Thaw’s daughter in ORACLE (S7:E1) so presumably this wasn’t your idea either?

RUSS: Um… Kind of yes and no. I thought as a story it would be great to see Mrs.Radowicz again. It felt like it connected with her earlier story. To follow that to its conclusion. And all else followed.

DAMIAN: Do you think you would have written any dialogue slightly differently as a nod to acknowledge their relationships – perhaps similar to the way you did with Abigail Thaw and her father in FIRST BUS TO WOODSTOCK – if you had known in advance of writing the script that Roger would be joined by his wife and son?

RUSS: No. The material for Abi was intentionally slightly knowing – as it was conceived as a one off. But a much straighter bat was played with Rebecca and William.

DAMIAN: I noticed on Britbox that they call the first episode of Endeavour, OVERTURE, and not FIRST BUS TO WOODSTOCK as we’ve always referred to it. What’s the official title then?

RUSS: OVERTURE — in the end it was felt we should keep to the one word title that’s become part of our world.

DAMIAN: Not for the first time, Endeavour explores the issue of racism. Is this purely because of what was happening in real life during the period or is it a subject that you feel compelled to return to or perhaps have personally witnessed?

RUSS: We were led by the history. The election of 1970 with its National Front candidates — and there was a big protest march against the proposed Immigration Act which was passed the following year.  The purpose of the Immigration Act was – you won’t be surprised to find – to control — i.e., limit – immigration from Commonwealth countries which was perceived to be on too great a scale. It was a matter of national interest at the time – so we covered it, and it was all of a piece with the restaurant.

DAMIAN: Were there gangs that you remember from your own youth?

RUSS: No. Not particularly. South London where I grew up – there may have been that in the generation above us – but black and white kids played together and just got on with life. It was a very mixed demographic. Fewer Indian, Pakistani, or Bangladeshi families — but lots of Afro-Caribbean and biracial families. The pub over the way… the clientele there was pretty much exclusively white, but on the street the kids just all mixed in together and got on with being kids.  

DAMIAN: Away from these interviews, I’ve told you before that my first girlfriend was black and I don’t remember it ever being an issue with either our families or fellow pupils at school. Quite rightly, no one congratulated us on how “right on” or progressive we were and nor did anyone make any negative comments to us either. The point is that no one commented full stop because, as I’ve said, it wasn’t an issue. We went to the cinema together a few times – I might add that I always splashed out on such occasions and never got a Woolworths pic ‘n’ mix beforehand – and one time she brought along a friend who was accompanied by her boyfriend, both of whom were also black. Again, I honestly don’t think the fact that I was the only white person in the group ever occurred to any of us and we all went about our business quite innocently and oblivious to what anyone might or might not think. And yet, rather sadly, with the undoubtedly well-intentioned but constant contemporary focus on the subject of racism in film, television, journalism and perhaps most especially on social media, I really do suspect that I would be very conscious of the fact if I was dating a black girl today. How is this progress? Anyway, I suppose my question to you is do you think that there’s a danger of either preaching to the choir or alienating sections of the audience whenever you explore these sort of subjects because your political jibes – particularly in this film at the expense of the Conservatives, Brexit and UKIP – are not very subtle are they?

RUSS: Again — it’s the history and its cyclical nature that throws these things up.  Half a century on, immigration was again the issue of the day. If you’re dealing with a story from 1970 that covers the same preoccupations that have come around again, then comparisons are unavoidable. In 1970 it’s the NF – fascist and neo-Nazi bootboys – who’re leading the charge against immigration, and across the last thirty years or so it’s been another NF. You’re not seriously going to expect us to depict the National Front in a warm and cuddly light, are you? But it was the family story at the restaurant which is where we began. It was originally conceived as a kind of King Lear story set around an Indian restaurant — but that was almost too much to fit in to the two hour traffic of our stage. A cast of if not thousands then a dozen or so — and guest parts are at a premium. I’m limited to about ten or twelve in total — and when you’ve got a weave going — several stories interlaced, you need to people them — so the numbers at the restaurant came down.

DAMIAN: I thought the scene in the morgue where Mrs Radowicz identifies her son’s body was beautifully performed and intensely moving in illustrating how racism and violence not only affects the victim and perpetrator but also their families and the wider community. Was it important for you to provide some sort of balance in showing the violence from both sides when Gary is stabbed by a group of young Asian men?

RUSS: It was a way to illustrate the tragic and utter pointlessness of hatred. In this instance, hatred that takes ‘difference’ as its cause. You’ll remember Ray Winstone’s fate in Quadrophenia (1979). So — there it was mods and rockers. But the Montagues and Capulets are there too. 

DAMIAN: Let’s return to happier questions. We might expect Max to wear a pinny – for both cooking and cutting – but what a wonderful treat it was to see Strange in his kitchen wearing one whilst trying to learn how to cook! I had hoped that this might be a prelude to a later scene with him preparing a meal for a special young lady but sadly this proved not to be the case so what suddenly motivated him to put down the trombone and learn to cook instead?

RUSS: I think we were just playing around with the notion of food. And Strange – in Riggers’ hands – is a wonderful everyman. Most of us – men at least – would probably like to be Endeavour or Thursday, but in truth we’re probably a lot closer to Strange.

Graphic design by Gavin Lines

DAMIAN: Thanks to our last Q&A, I can’t help but hear Henry Mancini whenever Violetta appears but anyway, there’s a wonderful scene between her and Endeavour…

ENDEAVOUR: Venice was Venice. You stepped out of your life for a minute and you found yourself in mine. And it was wonderful. But it wasn’t real.

VIOLETTA: It was for me.

She moves in to kiss him but he turns away.

VIOLETTA (CONT’D): Tell me you don’t want me.

ENDEAVOUR: I don’t want you.

VIOLETTA: Tell me again.

ENDEAVOUR: I can’t save you.

VIOLETTA: Then no one can.

…You obviously know and the audience knows that having failed to save his mother, Endeavour tries to save everyone else – particularly women – but was he also aware of this when he said the line, ‘I can’t save you’?

RUSS: No. Very much not. I don’t think he understood the weight of it. He couldn’t save her from a bad marriage.

DAMIAN: Then what exactly did he mean and – as a very clever and perceptive detective – does Endeavour have any self awareness or clue regarding the reason why his relationships with women such as Susan, Claudine and Joan keep ending so dismally?

RUSS: Susan was too early. Claudine was never going the distance. Joan… He imagines declaring his feelings for Joan would be in some way being disloyal, and in some respect betraying the trust Thursday and by extension the family have placed in him.

DAMIAN: Not that he would, of course, but if Endeavour sought relationship advice from one of his friends, who might provide the most incisive observations about his shortcomings as a boyfriend?

RUSS: You see — I don’t think he has shortcomings as a boyfriend particularly. I think I’ve mentioned before his tendency to go all in and hold nothing back. If anything he’s too honest. When he falls, he falls hard. ‘When somebody loves you, it’s no good unless he loves you… All the way.’ Isn’t that the sentiment that’s supposed to prevail? Not some wishy-washy half-measure where you don’t declare your hand. ‘Vide cor meum’. Isn’t that what we all want? Isn’t that the ideal? Something real. ‘Give me some truth.’ 

DAMIAN: Why does Ludo say that Violetta hates the opera?

RUSS: It demonstrates how little he knows her — or how little he wants Endeavour to think he knows her…

DAMIAN: Ludo references Robert Danvers. Have you – some might add finally – moved on from Tony Hancock to Peter Sellers references now because not all of your wee nodettes are necessarily always in keeping with the period?

RUSS: There’s A Girl in My Soup (1970) is such a charming confection — and has owned my heart since I first saw it many, many years ago. Impossible to say with any degree of certainty — but Danvers feels pretty close to Sellers, or as close as we’re ever going to get on film. And he’s a food critic and restaurant reviewer — so it had to go in. I think we may have nodded to him before as one of the judges for the beauty contest… many years ago. And, of course, Ms.Hawn is just beguiling. The ‘seduction’ scene – which is a fabulously long two-hander sequence – is magic. Goldie Hawn proves more than a match for Sellers, who is only in his early 40s here – and posing as a somewhat moth-eaten and dog-eared Lothario. But as a piece there’s a wonderful evocation of the generation gap. Pre and post war sensibilities.

Wonderful Nicky Henson. John Comer – who had been one of Sellers’ droogies in I’m Alright Jack (1959), and with whom I got to work about ten years later. Gabrielle Drake – for all the Fandersons out there. Diana Dors! Tony Britton being just pitch perfect as always. And, of course, Nicola Pagett who lit up every frame – and sadly went ahead this year. She really was very special. Her performance in Privates on Parade (1982) — there you are, written by the great Peter Nichols – back to Morse again! — is a gem.

Oh – and Mike D’Abo’s ‘Miss Me in the Morning’ is a stone cold classic.

DAMIAN: Why is Endeavour doing his own decorating, is it because he wants to or that he can’t afford a decorator?

RUSS: It’s a class thing – isn’t it? Thursday you’ll recall decorating his own place. And it’s an extension of that. ‘Get a man in?’ Fatal to generalise, but one extrapolates much from one’s own circumstances – and ‘decorating’ for those of my socio-economic background, and I appreciate we were quite an idiosyncratic set-up, was always seen as the job of the ‘man of the house’ — else ‘the woman of the house.’ Getting decorators in was something perceived by us as something the middle-classes – encompassing the LMC – did. And of course — his legendary parsimony may have something to do with it.

DAMIAN: Endeavour is smoking again but we’d better not repeat our previous debates about this. However, Thursday is back on his pipe – I thought you told me something about him considering it old hat in the new decade?

RUSS: Smoking for Endeavour is very much Shaun’s input. Thursday’s return to the briar is where he’s happiest. The aberration was brought about by trying to fit with Box and Jago’s new beat, Daddio!

DAMIAN: The following scene between Mr and Mrs Bright after the faith healer left their home confused me a little:

MRS BRIGHT: He’s very handsome, don’t you think?

BRIGHT: Oh, yes. Very handsome, I’m sure.

MRS BRIGHT: Are you jealous, Puli?

BRIGHT: Desperately.

They then both smile at each other like it’s a joke, what’s going on here?

RUSS: I think – if I remember – she’s talking about Ludo, isn’t she? Teasing Bright. But given their unhappy history where ‘other men’ are concerned it’s a bit reckless. Bright – knowing how ill she is – goes along with it.

DAMIAN: Bright mentions that he visited Pankot during his time in India. Sounds thrillingly exciting, you might want to add this to the list of places you intend to visit by train one day?

RUSS: Only if there’s a ride on a mine-cart involved! But no heart extraction, thank you!

DAMIAN: There’s an important scene in the Indian restaurant where two of the brothers are talking about their understanding of where home is and their sense of identity and belonging. Given some of your background that we’ve discussed in this and our previous interviews, it struck me that the home and community in which you were raised is obviously vastly different from your current situation and I couldn’t help but wonder with which of these you feel most closely identified; do you feel more of a true sense of belonging to the world of Little Russ or Big Russ?

RUSS: Material circumstances may change, but I don’t think one’s values do. You can take the boy out of Battersea, &c.   

DAMIAN: Anything you can tell us about the second film of the new series, SCHERZO?

RUSS: Um… Not much. It’s directed in fine style by Ian Aryeh. We touch a bit on Endeavour’s family life. And Thursday has an away-day. It’s a bit of a celebration of a particular sub-strand of British film-making which was started by a book that arrived in 1971 and went on to become a series of books – so we felt justified in including it. The films came a few years later — but it’s a world I’ve always thought worth exploring, and with the window of opportunity closing on how many more worlds one’s going to get to look at… it felt like now or never.

Interview copyright © Damian Michael Barcroft 2021

THE ENDEAVOUR INTERVIEWS 2021: RUSSELL LEWIS PART I

An exclusive Endeavour interview with writer/deviser/executive producer Russell Lewis

Interview copyright © Damian Michael Barcroft 2021

Here we are again. Finally. At last.

We left Morse, Thursday and the rest of Oxford’s finest back in 1970. The world has obviously seen many changes in the intervening decades. And yet, the world has perhaps become even more different from the one in which the last episode of Endeavour was broadcast in February 2020.

So, given the uncertain times in which we now live, we may well find ourselves taking comfort from the past as we share a cup of kindness and remember old friends.

Graphic artwork by Gavin Lines

DAMIAN: Russ, how’s your memory?

RUSS: Unreliable.

DAMIAN: Well, as always, we’ll discuss the previous series – specifically ORACLE (S7:E1) in this first part of the interview – before offering a brief preview of the new one. So, let’s remind ourselves of how the seventh series began: It’s New Year’s Eve; Endeavour meets a mysterious and alluring brunette at a Venice opera house, while back at Oxford, Mr and Mrs Thursday leave a working men’s club in favour of seeing in the new year at home in front of the television from which the singing of “Auld Lang Syne” can be heard, and elsewhere, a woman is brutally murdered on a canal towpath. Russ, I don’t know if it’s opera, working men’s clubs, a quiet night at home in front of the TV, or maybe even a midnight stroll alongside a moonlit canal, but how do you usually like to celebrate New Year’s Eve?

RUSS: Quietly to the point of not at all. Early night, ideally. It’s funny, isn’t it, the things you remember. The mysteries of the world. I remember thinking when I first heard about them that ‘resolutions’ were some sort of quasi-religious thing. Probably because we were a godless bunch of heathens in our house, and with New Year falling so close upon Christmas the child’s mind somehow conflates the two as both somehow having something to do with the baby Jebus. I imagined, I think, for some years that there might be a bolt of lightning which would smite one, or demons would drag one off to the fiery basement if one broke one’s resolutions, which all seemed to involve abstention or self-denial of one form or another. The question usually being ‘What are you giving up for New Year?’ — Like some Pagan Lent. As a small kid what are you going to give up? Booze? Fags? Matchbox cars?

I always knew the jig was up though when Andy Stewart rolled around. That was it. There wouldn’t be anything worth watching after that. The ‘Big Film’ was done by ten-ish. Then it was kilts and accordions until first footing and stories of taking lumps of coal around to people’s houses ‘for luck.’ Absolute madness.

There’s an enforced ‘New start’ thing about it all that I find deeply resistable. The slate wiped clean. A second chance. Absolution and redemption arising from what exactly? It’s not a solstice or an equinox – which I can understand as a marker for something — but just an arbitrary date.

DAMIAN: [Note to self, never invite Russ to a New Year’s Eve party] I think it was SWAY (S2:E3) that you originally hoped to set at Christmas but your plans were thwarted, is ORACLE and the scenes in ZENANA (S7:E3) therefore the closest we’re likely to get to seeing a proper Endeavour festive episode?

RUSS: ICARUS (S5:E6) was also originally set at Christmas or in the run up to it.

DAMIAN: Back in the good old days of the first few series at least – the age of innocence, Eden before the fall and all that when Endeavour and Thursday were still chums and would go to the pub together and discuss sandwiches – would Thursday have invited Endeavour to Christmas dinner?

RUSS: I could swear I’ve written a scene where Win invited Endeavour to Christmas lunch.

DAMIAN: And would the Thursday family have turkey for Christmas dinner and, if so, might Win use the leftovers for sandwiches and disrupt the well-established cycle?

RUSS: Of course they’d have turkey. They’re not the Cratchits.

DAMIAN: Of course, we STILL don’t know what Thursday has for lunch on a Wednesday! Haven’t you created a problem for yourself here because the fans will be greatly disappointed if they never find out, and yet, the revelation is surely doomed to be anticlimactic after such a wait unless it’s something surprising or shocking like ortolan?

RUSS: Wasn’t it ortolan that formed the central delicacy in Mitterand’s last meal before he died. Some say of shame — as the joke has it. The only time you’d ever be likely to see Thursday bent over a bowl with a towel over his head would be when he was self medicating ‘a chest’ with Vicks in boiling water!

DAMIAN: What came first, the idea to begin series seven on New Year’s Eve or in Venice?

RUSS: New Year’s Eve — definitely. New decade.  

DAMIAN: Have you ever visited Venice?

RUSS: Only on celluloid. When there’s a break I mean to go by train.

DAMIAN: But you’ve visited Dorset?

RUSS: Mmm. Um — well, I’d thought it might be interesting and rewarding to shadow the events of the opera with our unfolding story for Endeavour — so that’s where it started.  The doomed lovers. The jealous “husband”. Lots of ‘misunderstandings’ in opera — but we could only really feather it in — we couldn’t present a whole opera, so we just created key scenes and arias. I say we — I did the English libretto, which Nicolo translated into ‘old Italian’, saving my ignorant blushes in so many ways, and Matt just knocked it out of the park, as he always does, with his incredible setting. We agreed beforehand on the period — so he had this mad challenge of writing something credibly baroque. He wrote so much music. Half an hour or thereabouts — just for those few opera moments onscreen. But if a thing’s worth doing… There’s a possibility that he and Nico might complete the thing and present it in concert in Italy – which would be incredible.

DAMIAN: How did you decide on the name, Violetta Talenti?

RUSS: Talenti came late — out of necessity and what would clear Compliance. But she was always Violetta. Doomed heroine. La Traviata

DAMIAN: I know from our previous interviews that you’ll often find inspiration from the characters you saw in films as a kid such as the influence of Joyce Grenfell in the first three of the St. Trinian’s series (1954 – 60), Shirley Eaton in various roles including Carry On Nurse (1959) and Sue Lloyd in The Ipcress File (1965) which all contributed to the creation of Trewlove. How did Violetta look in your mind’s eye as you created the character and was there a particular image – or vision! – that inspired you?

RUSS: Well, I’d be lying if I said La Cardinale wasn’t in there somewhere. As the Princess in The Pink Panther, perhaps.  A hint of Domino Vitale, I guess.

Publicity photo of Stephanie Leonidas (Violetta Talenti)
Claudia Cardinale in The Pink Panther (1963)
Claudine Auger who played Domino in Thunderball (1965)

DAMIAN: I’ve asked you similar questions before regarding some of the main male characters and you told me it’s difficult to describe a process that is so instinctive and done without analysis – something of a dissociated mental state where the dark passenger slips behind the wheel – but I still can’t help but wonder what Violetta’s voice sounded like in your mind’s ear as you typed her dialogue?

RUSS: Ever soft and low. I sort of had a joke in my head that she might sound like Dickie Greenleaf’s lover in much missed Anthony Minghella’s The Talented Mister Ripley — ‘Deeeeeki.  Deeeeeki Greenleaf.’  Crossed with Appolonia Vitelli – Michael Corleone’s Sicilian wife… [in The Godfather] the scene with the car where she’s showing her fluency in English by practising the days of the week, ‘Maaandi, Chewsdi, Wehnsdi…’ &c. But in all seriousness – I was hoping for something… cosmopolitan.  

DAMIAN: Given the possible echoes of Jack the Ripper, Hammer Horror and the Gothic genre more generally in this episode, I thought it was interesting that Stephanie Leonidas – who played Violetta – also appeared in Whitechapel (2009-13) and Dracula (2006). Anyway, I thought she did a marvellous job and had that inherent vamp or femme fatale quality about her.

RUSS: Yes — again, she had to make a big impression with relatively little screen time — so every moment had to count.

DAMIAN: I suppose you already had at least an impression of some of the voices of the female actors such as Abigail Thaw before you created their characters in Endeavour but I wonder if you now hear the voice of someone like Sara Vickers as you write dialogue for Joan or the sound you originally envisioned before that part was cast?

RUSS: Yes, absolutely. I now see/hear all the regular characters as those who give them such vivid life. But I guess it was the speech pattern for each of them that came first, and has been refined the more I’ve written them.

DAMIAN: Do you think that you would have still run with the Violetta character and storyline if Joan hadn’t been away on “secondment”?

RUSS: That’s a great question. Any change as great as being robbed of Sara V., is going to have a massive effect on the story we tell. So many choices that we’re obliged to make are as a result of things which are nothing to do with the story — location goes down, or has to change, or something’s simply beyond our budget to realise as well as we’d like, but artiste availability is without doubt a huge influence. And it’s got tougher with each series. Serves us right for having such a fantastic cast. But yes — one has to ‘write around’ absences. You might just have an actor for three days across two films — and those three days might have to be together. So you find a way that one or two of those three days fall at the end of the schedule for one film, and bring forward a one or two from the following film’s schedule to roll over after the end of the previous film — a time when crew are typically catching their breath. We’ve just done so on this series. But it’s all a juggling act for every department at every level. It’s possible that it would have been a very different series if Sara V., had been available.

DAMIAN: You’ve told me on more than one occasion that you’re deeply invested in Joan’s journey and so I was wondering if you have attempted to compensate for her absence last time and tried to put whatever character development and storylines you had originally planned for both ‘70 and ‘71 into the new series?

RUSS: I don’t know about compensate. I love writing for Sara. Loved what she did with Joan right from the off. She’s a fantastically sensitive and thoughtful actor. Everything you care about with Joan, you care about because of Sara. Her extraordinary skill and talent. She has to do and convey so much with great economy. But, yes — I am deeply invested in Joan’s character and story. I’ve loved what we’ve been able to do with her. It feels like she’s been on a long and often painful journey of self-discovery.

DAMIAN: Both in terms of the characters and the actors who play them, Sara Vickers and Stephanie Leonidas could hardly be more different. In many ways, Violetta is obviously typical of someone that Endeavour finds himself attracted to – frequently vulnerable, dangerous or doomed and almost always unobtainable – and while Joan is often vulnerable too, she’s also inherently good, kind and someone who could offer Endeavour comfort and stability. So in terms of the characters he’s attracted to, I don’t know whether this makes any sense at all or if it makes absolute perfect sense?

RUSS: Emotionally, at least, he is drawn to self-destruction. He’s a romantic, for whom love has to be indistinguishable from suffering. Small wonder given his personal history. Arrested development. He is forever reaching for the perfect/idealised woman — because the woman he idealised escaped him when he was twelve. So – one might argue, he sets his heart upon the unattainable, because there is comfort in the predictability of disappointment.  

DAMIAN: I obviously understand that he’s had a belly full of blood and guts but was Thursday buying a couple of canaries a metaphor for both his children having flown the nest as he tells Win they are a pair – a cock and a hen – and says, ‘we might get some chicks.’?

RUSS: Write what you know. It was from life. For some years as a kid, I shared an attic with my old man’s canaries. Early risers.  

DAMIAN: Win is not very happy about the birds and asks him where they are going to be kept to which Thursday replies, ‘Up my arse, Winifred. That’s where we’re gonna keep them. Up my arse. Like David Nixon.’ I laughed when I first watched this scene but then almost immediately felt guilty when I saw the reaction shot of Win looking hurt. However, when I rewatched it, I laughed again and thought she was a bit of an old nag for moaning about the mess of feathers and suchlike but I’m still divided about it. Whose side are you on?

RUSS: I can see both sides. Which is probably how we got into this mess.

DAMIAN: With Jack Bannon spending most of his time in Gotham City just lately, how likely is it that we’ll ever see Sam Thursday again?

RUSS: Jack’s #TeamEndeavour always.

DAMIAN: I remember magicians like Tommy Cooper and Paul Daniels but I had to google David Nixon, is he someone you remember hiding birds in astonishing places during your own childhood?

RUSS: He was a regular Light Entertainment fixture. Often ‘assisted’ by Anita Harris, if memory serves. As a kid he’d tip up on variety shows — and then had his own series on Thames that went out sort of midweek around 5.15. I didn’t have the patience for the show as a boy. Probably because it betokened the end of kids TV and the news on next, before the wretched Today. I’ve always found that post-news, magazine programme slot depressing beyond tablets.

David Nixon and Anita Harris

DAMIAN: As always, there’s a plethora of other cultural references or nods – I think you call them wee nodettes – but I fear it would be very tedious for you to confirm or deny every single one of them so I’m just going to ask about a few of my favourite possibilities. Was the whistling suspect a reference to Peter Lorre’s serial killer character, Hans Beckert, in Fritz Lang’s M (1931)?

RUSS: As much ‘Molly Malone’ from The Premature Burial – to be honest.

DAMIAN: You use the words ‘my kind of girl’ or something very similar and Doctor Blish uses a tie in a strangulation attempt. In addition to most Hitchcock films, I’m crazy about Frenzy (1972) which features Barry Foster as Bob Rusk who says ‘you’re my type of woman’ or ‘girl’ throughout the film before strangling them with his tie so I was wondering if this was another wee nodette?

RUSS: Yes, Frenzy’s hard to ignore at the top of the 70s, isn’t it? I think one has to set Frenzy in the aspic of its times, and contextualise it through Hitchcock’s… particular interests. There’s much I like about it — and much I find ugly and repellent. There are moments of great discomfort for the viewer, I think. The older I get, the harder I find some of it to watch. I love the travelogue of it. My very dear friend Paul Tropea, with whom I first started writing, worked on it as a kid — I think, the discovery of the body floating in the Thames — and saw Mr Hitchcock. So… Six Degrees of Separation.

DAMIAN: From the opening montage featuring a barmaid pursued by a menacing unseen presence along the canal, the inserts of a full moon, rats, cats and ravens, to the final shot of a Jack the Ripper-esque figure brandishing a cane-sword and fleeing the scene of the murder with his cloak – or at least longcoat – flapping in the wind, wasn’t ORACLE a little more Gothic than we’ve seen in Oxford for a while?

RUSS: Yes. I was reaching a bit for that rather odd vibe of Dracula A.D.1972 and The Satanic Rites of Dracula – when Hammer brought the Count into the modern age with varying degrees of success. I do like those films, but perhaps more for their 70s’ aesthetic than anything else.  Scream and Scream Again and the AIP Count Yorga pictures were also in the mix. Which is probably a bit at odds with the gothic you’re referring to. We were very consciously referencing the predatory framing, subjective angle of that ‘damsel in distress’/’next victim’ thing in the Hammers. Not quite pastiche — but we were trying to utilise the same visual grammar. Because the whole Towpath Killer story was an extension of that possibly unintended message by the film makers. The threat – euphemistically portrayed as vampirism – is, of course, implicitly sexual. Attractive young woman on lonely towpath… It felt very much of its, ‘well, she’s only got herself to blame’ time. Do you know what I mean? An overt distillation of a lot of things the Women’s Conference was pushing back against. The Patriarchy, innit?

DAMIAN: Indeed, the only thing missing was Michael Ripper as the landlord…

RUSS: Yes, indeed. He’s been a constant reference point across the years.

DAMIAN: And finally with reference to Rippers, aspects of the plot obviously reminded me of the Victorian spiritualist and medium, Robert James Lees, who was alleged to have psychically identified Jack the Ripper. I wonder if you believe in the possibility of such mystic powers and paranormal phenomena?

RUSS: Ah, Robert James Lees. Played by Donald Sutherland in a great favourite of mine – Murder By Decree (1979) – which has just been issued on Blu-Ray – featuring the late, great Christopher Plummer as Holmes and James Mason at Watson — as they go after Jack the Ripper. It’s heavily influenced by Stephen Knight’s The Final Solution – which has now been much discredited. Alan Moore’s From Hell leans into that particular scenario quite heavily too, if I remember correctly.

RUSS: I won’t be telling a scholar of Ripper Street and all pertaining to it such as yourself anything, but recently we have had two terrific pieces of work that look at the events of 1888 in a new light — Hallie Rubenhold’s truly wonderful Five Women and Bruce Robinson’s spectacular They All Love Jack. Each book is fuelled by a righteous anger, and neither ever loses sight of the human tragedy at the heart of what has grown over the past hundred and forty years into ‘an industry’.

I suppose movies such as Murder By Decree fall into that ‘industry’ — but like those two books, there’s an anger and a humanity about Holmes – a fury at what has been done to the women in the story – that burns up the screen.  

So — Lees. Dramatically, I think psychics and mediums are very useful characters to have at one’s disposal. Do I believe it?  ‘Today will be a Sunday for most Virgos.’

DAMIAN: And we have Mrs Bright who is hoping that faith healers will help with her cancer which later leads to a beautifully understated scene between Mr Bright and Thursday where they have a brief philosophical discussion about faith and although both seem sceptical, neither obviously says so. In terms of dealing with difficult problems and situations which are beyond their control, would you say there might be a parallel between Mrs Bright turning to faith healing and Thursday buying a pair of canaries?

RUSS: I had a lot of experience of faith healers visiting the house for the ‘laying on of hands’ when I was very small. For a while it felt like they were always there. I found them sinister. A bunch of strange men — and they were always exclusively men — visiting. So – no, not for me. Mrs Bright..? Well — one would imagine pain, fear and desperation might lead any of us to reach for deliverance. By whatever means. No atheists in the foxhole. 

I think Thursday understands that. And he’s open minded enough to imagine that – for all his reservations – there may be ‘more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy…’ He can also see that Bright is clinging to hope — and Thursday would be the last person to take that from a soul.

The canaries… He was reaching for beauty and innocence. A simpler time. His version, I suppose, of Max’s ‘something has to be lovely’.

DAMIAN: Well let’s turn to the subject of feminism. Was this something you were really keen to explore at this particular stage of the series – 1970 – or was it the coincidental fact that a National Women’s Liberation Conference really did take place at Oxford’s Ruskin College in the same year or the even happier coincidence that one of the organisers of this event, Sally Alexander, was actually John Thaw’s first wife and the mother of Abigail Thaw?

RUSS: Yes, it was. It was kind of key to all we were doing, really. On the one hand you’ve got this wicked individual on the towpath doing what he’s doing — and on the other you’ve got women organising. Sisters very much doing it for themselves.

DAMIAN: Did you come up with the idea of having Abigail’s daughter, Molly-Mae Whitmey, cameo as her own grandmother?

RUSS: It certainly wouldn’t have been me who broached it — I’m far too shy. Fools rush in. &c., and I’m terribly aware of rifling through people’s lives and memories. I probably felt I was already pushing my luck in touching on it at all, but when one’s dealing with those whose loved ones literally created history and you want to cover that history because it’s hugely important… I see no ships. But everyone was delightful and enthusiastic about the conceit, and I was delighted we got to do it.

DAMIAN: Do you think John would have chuckled at this?

RUSS: Possibly. But we’d probably be missing the point of that first Women’s Conference by several country miles if we wondered too loudly about John’s reaction to what we’ve done.

DAMIAN: I thought it was a very lovely touch. Anyway, I think the only thing that I wasn’t sure about in this film was when Endeavour gives away his rare test pressing of the Calloway ‘54 Traviata from La Scala to Ludo. Has Endeavour really not listened to it for years, and even if that’s the case, wouldn’t it be even more precious to him given his signed Calloway record from the first film was stolen?

RUSS: I fancy — being a test pressing – that the quality might not have been too terrific.

DAMIAN: He might be too stingy to buy you a pint but he’ll happily give away priceless rare records and travel to fancy places like Venice, has Endeavor won the pools?

RUSS: I think it reflected Endeavour’s overwhelming loneliness and a need for a friend.  He does tend to go ‘all in.’ Joyce notwithstanding, there’s a bit of ‘only child’ about that impulse. The same with women, too. He falls fast and hard. The dam breaks – and whomever is the object of his interest has to bear the weight of all that has been penned up behind the wall for so long. Too much for some. Too much for most, one would imagine.

DAMIAN: During the murder enquiries, Strange gets a statement from the producer of the Higher Maths Module TV programme and says he was ‘Quite flamboyant, as is often the way with these people.’ Are television producers quite flamboyant, do you think?

RUSS: A Strange euphemism. Period ‘code’ for those who are ‘not as other men.’

DAMIAN: What about executive producers?

RUSS: Oh, certainly. Some more than others.

DAMIAN: Once again, series seven had a strong story arc as opposed to the more stand-alone and episodic nature of early Endeavour episodes and, of course, both the original Inspector Morse and Lewis. I personally favour this approach but is it also something you prefer or is there a particular demand from ITV, Mammoth Screen or Shaun and Roger?

RUSS: Going for a strong series arc was an attempt to deal with Shaun and Rog wanting to do a shorter run of three films. I think the developing crime story was a lot for people to keep in their head from week to week, but I very much didn’t want to do a ‘Previously on Endeavour’ recap ahead of each film’s overture.

DAMIAN: Last time we spoke I asked to what extent your vision for series eight might need to be adapted because of the delay in filming and you said it wasn’t 100% clear at that point (August 2020). Have you managed to keep to your original design or were there significant revisions along the way?

RUSS: We were a bit battered by Wartime Conditions. Who wasn’t? I mean — clearly we weren’t frontline health workers — praise them with great praise – but technically what we could achieve and realize on screen for the audience was impacted. So – we had to find new ways of doing things, and think our way around sundry physical problems.  What we were going for would have been a challenge in any normal year — but given what we were up against in terms of changed working practises, they were probably ten times as challenging. We did our best to make sure you can’t see the join, as it were — but, I’d be lying if I said it wasn’t tricky. I’ll clue you in to some of the workarounds further down the road.

DAMIAN: You also said that Endeavour was in a good place in terms of the stories and if you got it right, series eight could be the strongest run yet! Well, I’m bound to ask, did you get it right?

RUSS: Um — not for me to judge.  “Man’s reach, Thursday…” But really – who knows?  

DAMIAN: What can you tell us about the first film of series eight, STRIKER?

RUSS: Typically, as little as possible. It will all be there in the listings. Damien Timmer [executive producer/joint-managing director of Mammoth Screen] has wanted to touch on the beautiful game for a long time, and with our opportunities to do so diminishing, it felt like now or never. It’s funny — a whole bunch of things just seemed to line up for us in terms of this particular week in history, most of which we managed to fold into the story.

DAMIAN: And finally, as I always do, can I also ask what you personally remember from the year in question and what such social, political or cultural influences might have found their way into this series?

RUSS: Strange what one recalls, but I remember very clearly being at Shepperton Studios in the summer of ‘71 and a radio blaring out ‘Chirpy Chirpy Cheep Cheep’ by Middle of the Road.  “Where’s your mamma gone?” which brings us back to Endeavour…

Interview copyright © Damian Michael Barcroft 2021

ENDEAVOUR SERIES 8

EXCLUSIVE INTERVIEW WITH WRITER RUSSELL LEWIS

Interview copyright © Damian Michael Barcroft 2020

DAMIAN: There were various sources reporting on the potential severity of the Coronavirus from about late December of last year but it wasn’t until I read that the new James Bond film, No Time to Die, had been postponed – a move which apparently cost an estimated $30-50 million according to The Hollywood Reporter (5th March) – that I realised the situation must be very much more serious than many people were initially anticipating. Can you describe the mood in the entertainment industry from your own perspective pre-lockdown?

RUSS: Uncertainty. A fair bit of whistling past the graveyard. It’ll all be over by Easter, &c. But, perhaps because I always tend towards expecting the worst case, I thought it would be pretty catastrophic.

DAMIAN: When was filming of the eighth series of ENDEAVOUR originally scheduled to start filming and to what extent had pre-production already begun?

RUSS: I’m trying to think back now. We were aiming for late summer, I think. So, it sort of had and hadn’t. In any event, lockdown arrived. Shaun and Roger had asked that I put something together – a document outlining the remaining grand arc and individual stories. So – I did that, and after a Zoom and some further conference calls back and forth, they were both content to commit. What was it Lennon said on the roof of Apple? “I’d like to say thank you on behalf of the group and ourselves, and I hope we’ve passed the audition.”

I was putting the second GRACE film together – the Peter James/Roy Grace/John Simm show for ITV with my old buddy Andrew O’Connor – and that needed my attention until we’d got that to a happy place. We were very much in pre-production on that – and should have been shooting April/May/June — so, that took priority for the Network, as that was shooting first. And then – that got mothballed with the Lockdown.

So – it’s been a case of stop and start across the board. But we’re in a good place with the ENDEAVOUR stories. If we get it right, I think it could be our strongest run.  Something about moving into the new decade… It’s so incredibly gruesome on many levels – socially, politically, aesthetically. You know – we’ve talked before about ‘68 being the comedown from that optimism and a sense of hopeful ‘anything is possible’. Well…  Boy! Multiply that by ten moving from the 60s into early 70s. A great disturbance in the Force. But there’s a lot of excitement, too. There’s darkness and danger in the air — and ‘71, the shape of much of the rest of the decade starts to come into focus.  

DAMIAN: Had you written all of the series 8 scripts at that point or just the first episode?

RUSS: We were really just on the nursery slopes.

DAMIAN: And to what extent have you had to adapt your original vision for series 8 because of the delay in filming?

RUSS: It’s not 100% clear yet – but I think we might get away with the design more or less intact. But I’m revising it constantly in my head.

DAMIAN: How have you kept yourself busy during lockdown?

RUSS: Writing. Really. Lockdown for people that do what I do is pretty much what life is like the rest of the time. It’s nice not to be doing it with a gun in one’s mouth, though.

DAMIAN: BBC News recently posted a piece on its website (5th August) quoting figures from Ofcom revealing the extent of the surge in TV watching and online streaming during the lockdown: ‘adults spent nearly six and a half hours a day watching TV and online video’ (at least 45 hours per week), ‘1 hour and 11 minutes per day watching streaming services’ (double what it was before the pandemic), ‘12 million customers signed up to a new services like Netflix, Amazon Prime and Disney+’ (making viewing figures for video streaming services up 71% on last year) and public service broadcasters such as BBC, ITV, Channel 4 and Channel 5, ‘achieved their highest combined monthly share of broadcast TV viewing (59%) in more than six years in March.’

Now, the reason I mention this is that every film or TV show has a vast cast and crew that needs to earn a living just like anyone else and it might be worth pointing out that – in comparison to the hundreds of artists credited during end titles – it is only a minority of big names in the industry who might be able to survive financially without work for months on end. Given that many actors and freelancing crew won’t be in regular employment until next year at best, do you think the government is doing enough to support the entertainment industry during this crisis?

RUSS: Really. You don’t want to get me started on the government. It wouldn’t be helpful. People will make their own minds up as to whether they think they’re competent or not. It won’t come as any surprise that I’m against just about everything they are, do, and stand for. It’s been horrendously grim for freelancers across the board – not just in media. The first duty of any government in such circumstances is to lend aid and support to all who need it.    

DAMIAN: Realistically, when is series 8 of ENDEAVOUR likely to begin filming?

RUSS: Unhelpfully, all I can say is ‘as soon as it’s safe to do so.’

DAMIAN: First Bus to Woodstock (aka Pilot or Overture) was obviously just the one episode, series 1, 2, 3, 4 and 6 had four episodes per series, series 5 contained a whopping six episodes while the last series had just three. Therefore, is it difficult to know how long a series will take to shoot and might this uncertainty make the availability of the regular cast problematic even during the best of times?

RUSS: No. Not how long it will take to shoot. Never that. That’s – pre-COVID – been worked out down to the second more or less. So much for prep – so much for shoot – so much for post. We’ve pretty much always been able to work around the commitments – real life and creative – of our regular cast. I missed Mx.Vickers last year. Desperately. But that really was force majeure.

DAMIAN: First Bus aired in January and series 3 and 4 also began their run in January. Series 5, 6 and 7 were broadcast between February and March while series 2 aired over March and April and series 1 across April and May. Why does the network always seem to favour broadcasts early in the year?

RUSS: Well — we had a massive hiatus between S2 & 3, due to – we were told at the time – the football across the summer having an impact on the schedule. So that shifted our production from summer/winter to spring/summer. As with INSPECTOR MORSE there’s something attractive about a big slice of green-gold Oxford when the trees are still bare in real life. Not exactly the first cuckoo, but certainly a promise of something just around the corner.

DAMIAN: I know you’re not allowed to say when series 8 is likely to be broadcast or how many episodes it will consist of. However, I’m wondering what amount you comfortably prefer as a writer because – and we’ve often talked about your countless nights of sleep deprivation scribbling away doing rewrites etc. – 6 episodes are possibly too many, both for you and the cast and crew. What’s a nice number of episodes to write per series do you think?

RUSS: I’d take 6 every time – because it allows a greater variety of stories, and gives you more time to explore character. But I think it’s highly improbable such an event would happen again for us. It takes a huge toll on cast and crew. They’re massively long days for all the firm. It’s physically and mentally demanding.  

People look at a film set and see what appears to be vast amounts of people standing around – but here’s the thing, and it’s often missed – all those people, and at the point of the sharp end, those front of camera – have to maintain a perpetual state of readiness.  You know when you watch the runners line up for the 100 metres, say. They get down on the blocks, and ‘On your marks…  Get set…’ Well — actors are perpetually caught between ‘Get set’ and the pistol shot for 12-14 hours a day. The emotional line they have to deliver in a scene – that has to be available to them whenever ‘Action’ is called.  They could have been cooped up in a trailer for eight hours due to bad weather. You get a break in the clouds and it’s 1.2.3. GO! Or worse — you got part of the scene at the top of the day — and unforeseen circumstances means you can’t pick it up until the back end of the day. They’ve got to hold on to that emotional energy, and be ready to go in a heartbeat. Some days are just on/off — on/off — on/off.  It’s not mine clearance in a war zone or operating as a medic in under shellfire, but it’s a particular demand upon the individuals involved.  

So — eight, nine months of that… which is what it takes for a 6 film run… That’s a big ask. A huge investment of everyone’s time and creativity. And the crew — first in, last out… Everybody has to bring the proverbial A-Game. So… Yeh. Lovely for me to have all that story to tell — but pretty brutal for everyone else to have to deliver it.

DAMIAN: Finally, one website recently posted an article with the headline, ‘Why Endeavour is likely to end after season eight’, and another one was less ambiguous with ‘Morse prequel Endeavour to end in 2021 after series eight’. Might devoted fans well be advised to ignore such clickbait?

RUSS: I’ve always said I’ll do it for as long as those involved want to make it and the audience want to see it. So. The only reliable information will come from the Network.  That’s it. Everything else is conjecture and surmise.

Here’s the thing. All three series have sprung from Colin. That’s where it starts, and where it will end.

His creation has been onscreen in one fashion or another across five decades now. If you go back to the writing and publication of Last Bus – that adds a sixth decade.

That’s quite some knock.  

So – the sun may be sinking behind the pavilion, and into the West away — but in a very real creative sense, C.Dexter is still at the crease – and no batsman likes to fall on 99.

DAMIAN: Thank you Russ, please stay safe and I hope to see you – and Oxford’s finest – back in action very soon.

RUSS: You too.

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© Damian Michael Barcroft 2020

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