Tag Archives: Russell Lewis

THE ENDEAVOUR INTERVIEWS 2023: RUSSELL LEWIS PART III

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

Drinks at the Randolph

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

~

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

– Dr. Daniel Cronyn, FUGUE (S1:E2)

‘Hold on tightly, let go lightly.’

~ The final exclusive Endeavour interview with Russell Lewis ~

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

-TERMINUS (S8:E3)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

THURSDAY seeing DOROTHEA out… 

THURSDAY: Thanks for coming.

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

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

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

WIN: Who’s this for? Morse?

(off THURSDAY)

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

JOAN: Mum, don’t say that.

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

JOAN – stabbed to the heart.

JOAN: Don’t. Please…

THURSDAY: What does that mean?

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

JOAN: No.

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

(to THURSDAY)

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

And with that WIN heads off.

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

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

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

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

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

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

JOAN: I know.

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

CUT TO:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

JOAN: opens the door to STRANGE.

JOAN: Jim?

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

(he smiles)

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

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

JOAN: I’m sorry, I just…

JOAN covers her face and breaks down. 

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

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

And he has.

CUT TO:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The monumental privilege of it.  My God.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

That’s it.  And that’s all.

We made a hat where there never was a hat.

Who could hope to do more?

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

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

DAMIAN: To the end…

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

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

“Yes, sir.”

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

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

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

THE ENDEAVOUR INTERVIEWS 2023: 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: 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: 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.

~~~

© Damian Michael Barcroft 2020

~

THE ENDEAVOUR INTERVIEWS 2020: RUSSELL LEWIS PART III

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

Interview copyright © Damian Michael Barcroft 2020

EXT. CHIGTON GREEN/POST OFFICE/ROAD – DAY 1

The CHIGTON GREEN CLOCK – telling the time. Never too quickly. Never too slowly. Telling the time for Chigton…

A SIGN for: “CHIGTON GREEN” Here the green. There the duckpond. Shops. Butcher, baker, candlestick maker. Fishmongers. Post Office.

Well-tended houses and gardens. Garden gnome – fishing…

CONFECTION (S6:E3)

Trumptonshire: Camberwick Green, Chigley and Trumpton

DAMIAN: This opening to CONFECTION was filmed with idyllic shots of the quaint village including a white picket fence adorned with red roses and the overture ends with Farmer Bell shooting Mandy-Jane with a shotgun. I wasn’t quite sure if I was watching Endeavour, an episode of Trumpton or David Lynch’s Blue Velvet. What mood were you and the director going for with this?

RUSS: Um… I think the picket fence was Leanne’s choice, as were the red roses. The Lynch probably more in her mind than mine – but I loved what she did with it. My only regret is that we ended up with the Roy Orbison and not her first choice. I love Roy Orbison — but the other track she ran with almost through to lock was a bit more kitsch and camp and torchy. A vocalist in the Kay Starr tradition… ‘Accused of stealing kisses, I’m guilty of the charge…’

DAMIAN: Preceding the scene where Endeavour meets Isla Fairford for the first time, you write that he ‘takes a moment – soaks up the atmosphere’ of the village which represents ‘a world and a life he left behind’. Not only is Isla obviously very attractive, but to what extent is Endeavour also attracted to the “notion” or “idea” of her and, rather ironically of course, the innocence she might represent in his longing for simpler times or the fact that he ‘grew up somewhere just like this’?

RUSS: What we were reaching for was a dull ache in his heart for somewhere – and more specifically – “someone” to call his own.

DAMIAN: Regarding the character of Isla, your script references Middlesex, a poem by Betjeman, with the following quotes: ‘Fair Elaine, the bobby-soxer, fresh complexioned with Innoxa… well-cut Windsmoor… Jacqmar scarf of mauve and green’. What was it about this poem that resonated with the character of Isla?

RUSS: Well — we were smashing together Christie, Trumptonshire, and Chitty Chitty Bang Bang in our creative Hadron Collider… and, you remember those wonderful illustrations across the opening of the Hickson Miss Marple?

The characters feel very late 40s through 50s. Actually – a touch of Long Weekend in there also. Mayhem Parva preserved in aspic. But there’s something sly about the eyes of all of them. And the Betjeman seemed to chime very happily as a short-hand for the kind of young woman she presents to the world. I think also – there’s a tiny echo of Barbara Shelley in Village of the Damned. Maybe a bit of Truly Scrumptious too. We were playing around a little with a Christie classic.

DAMIAN: In the Endeavour and Isla duck pond scene you write a line of action in the script that reads ‘One lonely heart lurches towards another.’ Obviously deceiving the audience is part of the game in murder mysteries but in reference to the cast and crew, do your scripts always tell the “truth” about a character or is there an equal objective to surprise those at the readthrough as well?

RUSS: Not the readthrough so much, as anyone’s first reading. By the time we get to that – most people are familiar with it. You want to convey in the stage directions the same experience the viewer will have when they see it for the first time. Physically and emotionally.

DAMIAN: The scenes ends with Endeavour asking Isla out on a date: ‘Look, I’m not really in the habit of, uh… – I just wondered if – perhaps – you’d care to go for a drink somewhere later… (a moment) With me.’ Is this supposed to be ironic considering Endeavour is exactly in the habit of falling for and attempting to romance wrong’uns?

RUSS: I think it reflects where he is at that point in his head. He’s not firing on all cylinders. He’s wounded emotionally. And a part of him has a fantasy of turning his back on the fight. Isla and her little boy are like a ready made, off the shelf family. He’s a weakness for those he perceives as vulnerable – so, of course, he’s drawn to her. Having failed to save his mother, he is compelled to try to save everyone else. As if in doing so, he might bring her back. It’s a nonsense – and childlike magic thinking, and I’m sure it’s all subconscious. But there’s a truth to the psychology of it.

ENDEAVOUR: I met someone. She’s got a kid. A boy. Five years old. It could be – I don’t know – something. (off STRANGE) Why not? Everybody else gets a shot – why should I be any different?

STRANGE: Because you are.

ENDEAVOUR: What if I don’t want to be? Isn’t that what it’s supposed to be about? Something to come home to.

STRANGE: I wouldn’t know. Some day. Maybe.

DAMIAN: Isn’t it about time for a strange bedfellow?

RUSS: Ho ho. Well — we’ve seen him on a date, haven’t we? I think he gets by. But there’s nobody special at the moment.

Back in NOCTURNE (S2:E2)

INT. THURSDAY’S OFFICE/POLICE STATION – DAY 4

ENDEAVOUR with THURSDAY…

THURSDAY: What’s this you were with Shepherd’s daughter at the pub?

ENDEAVOUR: It was just a drink.

THURSDAY: She’s a suspect. Christ, what’s the matter with you? Bat their lashes and you’re just…

ENDEAVOUR: I’ve got a life.

THURSDAY: Not on duty, you haven’t.

ENDEAVOUR: I wasn’t on duty.

THURSDAY: It shouldn’t matter. A copper’s a copper – first, last and always.

ENDEAVOUR: And where’s that got you?

THURSDAY – a kicked dog. Torn between shame and the urge to lash out. ENDEAVOUR instantly regrets the shot.

DAMIAN: Thursday lost all the money he lent to his brother, Charlie, there’s the marriage breakdown, the death of Fancy and then, of course, there was also the demotion. Was it the misadventures in his home or work life that was the final straw?

RUSS: I’m not quite sure what you’re getting at? In Thursday crossing the line? Oh – I think all of those things. He’s in a mess.

INT. PUB 2 – NIGHT 3

BOX: After the way they’ve treated you? I wouldn’t treat a dog like that. Christ, you must’ve noticed a change in your pay-packet? And you’ve still got a wife and kids to feed. (off THURSDAY) What’s next? They put you out to grass on some nothing job like old Reg? A man’s got his dignity, Fred – or he’s got nothing. Doesn’t make you a bad copper. Just makes you a smart one. Go on. Take the missus out this weekend. Treat her.

THURSDAY breaks. He reaches out – takes the envelope, and puts it into his pocket. BOX relieved.

BOX (CONT’D): Blimey. A minute there, you had me giving it two-bob, thrupenny bit.

THURSDAY: You and me both.

BOX: To be fair. I was no different the first time. Second time, you barely feel it. After that, it’s all gravy. Go on, then. Get ‘em in.

THURSDAY – his soul forfeit.

DAMIAN: As you are very well aware, fans have wondered about Mrs. Bright for years now. Years! So, wasn’t it a little cruel to the devoted curious that we finally meet her when she’s dying of cancer?

RUSS: Mmm. Rules of drama, old man. Come in as late as possible, get out as soon as you can.  It’s always been a case of how much screentime we have available.

INT. DINING ROOM/BRIGHT’S HOUSE – NIGHT 1

MRS. BRIGHT, (54), a great Society beauty, and the Deb of the Year in 1934, sits at the table – distracted. BRIGHT enters – bearing something lovely for her supper – which he sets before her.

BRIGHT: You are good to me, “Puli”.

DAMIAN: Why does she call him Puli?

RUSS: From their time in India. It means Tiger. For obvious reasons.

DAMIAN: Indeed. The scene in the film ends with ‘Oh ‘Puli’. I don’t think I’ve been a very good wife.’ and with a beautifully reassuring smile, Bright replies ‘No man ever had a better.’ In the script he has an extra line, ‘Is there… something you want to tell me?’ Either way however, and I thought he actually knew she was seriously ill before this, did you consider it more dramatic for the audience to learn about it from his conversation with Max rather than his wife?

RUSS: No – this was the moment she told him. I’d imagine the cut was more to do with timing. I think the question from Bright was possibly a case of crossed wires. Given their history, when she says ‘I don’t think I’ve been a very good wife,’ his immediate lurch would be the thought that she has committed some indiscretion, not that she’s about to tell him her number is up.

INT. MAX’S CLUB – DAY

MAX waiting. BRIGHT makes his way through the crowd. MAX stands to greet him.

MAX: Chief Superintendent.

BRIGHT: Doctor. It’s very good of you to meet me.

MAX: Not at all. What may I get for you?

BRIGHT: Oh – er… A brandy, I think.

MAX attracts the attention of a passing waiter.

MAX: Albert. A brandy, if you would.

WAITER heads off.

MAX: (CONT’D) They do quite a decent spot of supper.

BRIGHT: Excellent. Excellent. I’m sure.

MAX: Now – how may I be of service?

BRIGHT: I may rely on your discretion. As a medical man.

MAX: Always. Please. Speak freely.

BRIGHT: My wife has been diagnosed with cancer of the lungs. Inoperable, according to the specialist. She’s scolded me for an optimistic fool, but I wonder if you might recommend anyone from whom one could seek… a second opinion.

MAX: Well, there’s no better man in England than Sir Julian Fitzalan. I know him slightly and would be happy… (off BRIGHT’S reaction) Chief Superintendent?

BRIGHT: Julian is my wife’s specialist…

DAMIAN: I thought this scene was perfectly written, shot and performed – certainly one of my favourites from series 6. The scene heading in the script simply states ‘Max’s Club’ and I was wondering where and what this might be?

RUSS: Well — thank you. There’s a few Gentlemen’s Clubs in Oxford – but I think we were sort of leaning towards Frewen’s as a model – which is St.Aldate’s. Yeh — it was lovely to be able to have Anton and Jimmy share a two hander. And, of course, they both played it to perfection. There was a fair bit of weeping from certain hard-bitten crew members when the scene was shot, so that was a good sign.

DAMIAN: I’m presuming from the dialogue that this is the first time that the two have met outside of work -excluding funerals and suchlike- and we know from the scene in the garden at Max’s home that he and Endeavour don’t socialise either. Has Max not got anyone?

RUSS: Max’s private life is for the moment a closed book. It would be lovely to put some flesh on the bones. We saw a little more of Max in this run — his home, his club.

DAMIAN: Endeavour lost his father, Cyril, in HOME (S1:E4) but they had a troubled relationship and unlike two little boys I know extremely well, he wasn’t fortunate in having a special bond with his grandfather. However, he did have Thursday and that family unit of Fred, Win, Joan and Sam represented the happy home that Endeavour never had. Throughout series 6 Endeavour is ‘sickened’ by an ‘unrecognisable’ Thursday, never more so when he sees him drinking and smoking (a cigarette!) at the Indian restaurant with the Droogs. Endeavour suppresses the evidence in the suitcase that would have implicated Thursday in the conviction and hanging of the wrong man in the Clemence case at the beginning of series 6 – would he have done the same by the end of film 3 or the beginning of 4?

RUSS: Yes – I don’t think their friendship is thrown away as quickly or easily as that. Thursday in his way is punishing himself for Fancy. He hates himself because he blames himself for Fancy’s death – every bit as much as Endeavour blames himself — and I think the temptation with Box has to be viewed through that lens. It’s an act of self-harm. Almost as if he wants to be caught and punished for something. Anything that will bring an end to his torment.

The cigarette… He’s also feeling like yesterday’s man, and – I think you asked me in an earlier Q&A about why he puts away his pipe after glancing through to Box and Jago. Well — they’re the coming men – younger, The Sweeney in waiting… and they’re all on the tabs. Thursday suddenly feels his pipe is perhaps old fashioned. If he’s going to run with this mob, he’d better start fitting in. But I don’t think Endeavour gives up on him – or ever would entirely. There’s too much between them.

Endeavour is hurt and confused by Thursday’s uncharacteristic behaviour. Rog was adamant that he didn’t want Thursday’s crossing of the line to be a ruse or a wheeze – a wink to the audience – in order to get the bad guys – which is probably the line I would have erred towards. But it was just as important to me that he came to his senses of his own will.

ENDEAVOUR: I’m sorry about the Disciplinary. You deserved better.

THURSDAY: I don’t know about that. Anyone should answer for what happened to George Fancy, it’s me. I was in charge.

ENDEAVOUR doesn’t know where to go with this THURSDAY.

ENDEAVOUR: Well – good luck with it, anyway. (a final throw of the dice) If you – fancy a drink some time..?

THURSDAY: Yeh. Yes, we, uh – we must do that.

Offered with all the conviction of one who has no intention of doing any such thing. Worse – they both know it.

PYLON (S6:E1)

DAMIAN: Why couldn’t Thursday reach out to Endeavour?

RUSS: It was important to illustrate that the relationship had changed. That they were no longer the happy few, the band of brothers from Cowley. And that was true with all the relationships. Bright – sidelined. Strange – making his way up the greasy pole. Endeavour and Thursday estranged. It was important that the audience shared in their pain.

ENDEAVOUR: My report. Syringe is in the bag.

THURSDAY: I’ll see the Guv’nor gets it.

ENDEAVOUR: Anything?

THURSDAY: Early days. You know how it is.

Seeing ENDEAVOUR in CID is more ‘yesterday’ than THURSDAY can bear.

PYLON

DAMIAN: ‘Yesterday’, hardly a coincidence given your frequent Beatles references and the aptness of some of the lyrics…

Yesterday,

All my troubles seemed so far away,

Now it looks as though they’re here to stay

Oh I believe in yesterday

Suddenly,

I’m not half the man I used to be

There’s a shadow hanging over me

Oh yesterday came suddenly

…but why did you want ‘Mad About the Boy’ playing at Thursday’s home?

RUSS: It just helped edge Thursday into the idea that perhaps he was losing Win too. If she was going off to ballroom with another man, and playing Mad About the Boy on the radiogram…  It all played into his lost equilibrium.

DAMIAN: You described Endeavour as the little wooden boy (in reference to Max acting as his conscience in the garden scene from APOLLO) in one of our previous interviews and after Isla is arrested in CONFECTION, you write that Endeavour ‘casts a look back at the house. Shepherd and Henry [Isla’s five-year-old son] in the window. Another unhappy little boy.’ Do you sometimes think of Endeavour as a little boy?

RUSS: Not particularly — but it’s a large part of what made him, isn’t it? There was a much bigger spat between Isla and Endeavour at the car — a literal spat, insofar as I think Endeavour got a faceful of saliva – along with some very damning words from her.

But Henry — felt very much like an echo of his own history.

DAMIAN: You’re very perceptive but circumspect regarding melancholy childhoods aren’t you?

RUSS: ‘I am not I; thou art not he or she; they are not they’ There’s a fair bit of mud to dredge. Long closed rooms and deserted galleries on the upper floors. But no more than anyone else, I’m sure. It would be a mistake to draw any particular conclusions from it.

DAMIAN: All of the previous film titles of series 6 were self explanatory but why DEGÜELLO?

RUSS: You know my fondness for Westerns. At one point – the night before the gunfight – which I’d intended to be a much larger set piece – at the Four Winds quarry – I had Thursday singing along with Dean Martin on the turntable – ‘My Rifle, My Pony and Me.’ from Rio Bravo.

It was a much bigger build up for all of them. Long dark night of the soul stuff. But ‘Degüello’ as you know was a bugle call ordered by Santa Ana at the Siege of the Alamo. I believe the more or less literal translation is ‘cut throat’, but it’s a signal that ‘No quarter’ is to be given. That the fight will be to the death, and that no prisoners will be taken.

EXT. CRANMER HOUSE ENTRANCE – DAY 2

SANDRA emerges into a world of swirling grey dust.

She gasps what seems to be her last breath – and collapses out of frame…

…into ENDEAVOUR’S arms.

ENDEAVOUR looks up the tower. Shocked. Traumatised.

DEGUELLO (S6:E4)

DAMIAN: Although Newham is mentioned, I couldn’t help but think of the Grenfell Tower tragedy during the Cranmer House disaster, especially with the casting of the mum and her young daughter. Indeed, your script specifically states they are ‘Afro-Caribbean’, was this on your mind too?

RUSS: I was working very late the night Grenfell happened and had the TV on for company. I remember seeing the first phone camera footage coming in, and it was clear straight away that it was an utter catastrophe which would result in terrible loss of life. We’ve all seen fires – but I don’t think any of us had ever seen anything to compare with that. Not here. The only thing that springs to mind is the R101 Disaster. Something that was instantly beyond human agency to contain. Watching it, one couldn’t comprehend that there could be such a conflagration without some sort of accelerant. And, of course, we know now that it was the cladding – without which it would never have gone up the way it did, or spread so rapidly or so fiercely. That this was happening in the heart of the capital…

So… But that wasn’t the inspiration, although, obviously, it certainly coloured one’s approach.  We’d considered developing a story that drew on Ronan Point the previous year, but then Grenfell happened and it wouldn’t have been at all appropriate. But I think the level of civil indifference and arse-covering by all responsible parties – which is still being covered – concerned with Grenfell fed into our story. Essentially, people died because money was deemed to be more important than their lives. They died because they were less well off than their neighbours. Because they were held to be of small account. One has to be careful what one says and writes about it because the Inquiry is ongoing and criminal charges may follow. But, to borrow a lawyerly phrase, if ‘one takes oneself out of this case’ and talks in more general terms… It does feel as if one has been hearing the phrase ‘lessons must be learned’ for the majority of one’s adult life. Meaningless hand-wringing and lip-service contrition. It’s interesting to compare the wholly unbelievable pack of lies some professional villain will offer from the dock with the elegant and expensive sophistry of corporations and government at national and local level. The latter groups would likely not consider themselves as in any way comparable to the former — but in the end if comes to down to this. They are both lying to avoid responsibility and consequence.

In part, when people like those in Grenfell die, they do so because successive governments – with the connivance of a sympathetic press – have sold the lie that we can have a functioning and safe society without having to pay for it. It’s forty years we’ve been chasing this illusion. The asset stripping of the UK plc. Of course — some people have done very nicely out of it. But they’ve always done very nicely, thank you very much. I think we had Thursday nod to it years ago. ‘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 blooming shame.’

DAMIAN: Indeed. Let us move on. Marvellously nefarious performance but I thought the character of Jago was terribly underwritten. I obviously understand why now but would it have been possible to develop him further so we knew a little bit more about him without giving the game away?

RUSS: Anything is possible, and we could have gone further in drawing him out, but I think we quite liked all the attention being on Box, with Jago appearing as not much more than his side-kick, only to invert that power dynamic at the last.

DAMIAN: Tell me about your original idea to include a flashback to the snooker hall with both Fancy and Jago and why it wasn’t filmed?

RUSS: I thought it might have helped the audience – but it wasn’t practical for a number of reasons.

DAMIAN: ‘Surprise, you couldn’t see me for Box’. Was Jago’s line improvised because it isn’t in the script?

RUSS: I would imagine that to be the case. I’d intended a much bigger shoot out – but the best laid plans, etc.

Once Upon a Time in Oxford

Four guns speak almost as one. BOX shoots JAGO. JAGO shoots BOX. ENDEAVOUR and THURSDAY shoot JAGO. BOX and JAGO go down – JAGO mortally wounded. ENDEAVOUR kicks JAGO’s gun away, and watches the light die in his eyes – while THURSDAY sees to BOX.

BOX: I couldn’t do it. I couldn’t leave you to it.

THURSDAY: I know.

BOX: Who’d’ve thought…

DAMIAN: In contrast to what was scripted, isn’t the scene as shot and edited rather more ambiguous?

RUSS: Is it? I’ll take your word for it.

DAMIAN: And, despite what both you and Simon Harrison told me in our interviews last year, he did redeem himself after all?

RUSS: We lied.

DAMIAN: Was this always part of his journey as planned from the beginning?

RUSS: There’s a certain amount of development as you watch some relationships and performances across the early films in a run.

DAMIAN: Why was series 6 the right moment to introduce the house we know from Inspector Morse?

RUSS: Well — the whole series he’s been looking for somewhere to call his own, after all the various flats and dossing in the office. But we also know he’s not exactly loaded — so somewhere that had been a squat with an unhappy history… there goes the neighbourhood. It felt organic that he might have come into his long term home by such means. He is forever surrounded by ghosts.

INT. LIVING ROOM/SQUAT – DAY 2

DULCE DOMUM sprayed on the wall… STRANGE’S attention lands on the graffito.

STRANGE: (mispronouching it, natch) Dulce domum.

ENDEAVOUR: Sweet home.

STRANGE casts an eye over the wretched state of the place.

STRANGE: No place like it.

DEGÜELLO

DAMIAN: What was the idea behind the Jag on the scrapheap which was then restored to its former glory by the end?

RUSS: It reflected where Endeavour and Thursday were at the start of the run — and, again, it felt right that the black Jag be restored to Endeavour by the end. Something put out for scrap – dismissed and disregarded by all for the next bang up to date thing — that felt very much like Endeavour. And like the house – it’s a hand me down. Something wonky in some way. But his affection for the Jaguar… looks set to be lifelong.

DAMIAN: ‘I hope this will become clear in the watching’ you told me when I asked about the moustache last year. Did it become as clear as you would have liked or would you have preferred the following not to have been cut:

ENDEAVOUR: You. I thought I knew who you were – but this past year, I barely recognise you.

THURSDAY: Nice tache. (which brings ENDEAVOUR up short) You’ve never been one to follow fashion. So, what’s that all about?

ENDEAVOUR: Seemed like a good idea at the time. I don’t know. Maybe it’s like Nicholson. Living with something you can’t put right.

THURSDAY: George, you mean?

ENDEAVOUR: I couldn’t stand to wake up every day and look at the man in the shaving mirror. The face that’d… let him down. I thought… if it was someone else staring back, I could forget it. If it didn’t happen to that face – I could fool myself it never happened at all.

THURSDAY: Perhaps we’ve all been hiding one way or another. From ourselves. From each other. From George. You’ve always given me too much credit. I’m not what you think.

ENDEAVOUR: Yes – you are.

THURSDAY: Nah. I’m just an old flatfoot with too many miles on the clock.

ENDEAVOUR: What’s going on? This isn’t work. This is something else.

THURSDAY: I took a wrong turn, and it cost me. But I can see a chance now to set things straight.

DEGÜELLO

RUSS: Mmm. Again – I think this was a request. The boys – Shaun and Rog – asked for something which explained it. So, I wrote this exchange for them. Which, when they read it, they thought was too self aware.  Sometimes – less is more.

DAMIAN: Endeavour tried to forget the death of Fancy and Thursday took a wrong turn. In contrast, both Bright and Strange refused to be bribed and the latter never gave up on trying to get justice for Fancy. To what extent were Bright and Strange the real heroes of series 6?

RUSS: I think it was about the quartet – getting the band back together, overall. But, yes. It was lovely to strike those notes with Bright and Strange. And they were both hugely important. I don’t think one should imagine that Endeavour or Thursday had given up. Endeavour wouldn’t let it rest, either. They were both… winded, I think is the best way to look at it. What happened to Fancy hurt them both deeply — and knocked them back. They each have their strengths and weaknesses – but that’s what friends are for, isn’t it? When you stumble, they make sure you don’t fall. The reaction to it all was quite extraordinary though. People were getting quite cross that one had made them suffer for so long. But that had to be. If we’d just shrugged off Fancy’s death by the end of the first reel – it would have been pretty unsatisfying. By the time we got to the end, hopefully the audience had been on a credible emotional journey with them all.

DAMIAN: I’ve asked some of the cast this same question but I wonder what your take will be: albeit only temporarily, do you think the moral downfall of Thursday suggests that all bets are now off and anything is possible for the future of the show and its characters in terms of what the audience thinks they are ethically capable of?

RUSS: Yes, perhaps.

DAMIAN: What can you say about the last film of series 7, ZENANA?

RUSS: Er… There’s an advisory referendum… Lady Matilda’s college is exploring the notion of going co-ed. That’s the jumping off point. The good end happily and the bad unhappily. Or something like that.

DAMIAN: Will series 8 be the last adventure?

RUSS:  Nothing is written.

DAMIAN: I don’t know if you can remember much about our very first interview back in 2014 but I said it surely can’t be a coincidence that so much of your work features the police and detectives and you replied that ‘it’s mostly coincidence.’ Well, I was delighted to hear that you’ve scripted a new TV series and I was wondering what it was about?

RUSS: A very old friend from school – Andrew O’Connor – who amongst his manifold achievements has been responsible for Peep Show, and in the theatre is intimately involved in the Derren Brown shows – got in touch. He asked me if I’d be interested in adapting the tremendously successful Roy Grace novels by Peter James for television. They’re a very different kettle of fish to my Oxford adventures — leaning more towards thriller / procedural territory.  And they’re very much Peter’s stories. But they have a distinctive identity – set in Brighton. Grace is an interesting modern copper. They’re contemporary – which is something I haven’t done for a while. John Simm is playing Grace. So… Watch this space. More anon, no doubt.

DAMIAN: Russ, thank you very much indeed… oh, there was just one more thing. I know you’re familiar with the Cake Paradox but let me ask you about the Sandwich Dilemma. You’re having lunch at the Thursday house and Win has made a variety of sandwiches to show off her Monday to Friday range. However, you and a friend arrive a little late and there are only two sandwiches left: the cheese and pickle or the sandwich she makes for Fred on a Wednesday. Now, you’d really like to have the cheese and pickle but that would only leave the Wednesday Special for your friend and he or she might reveal the much discussed filling to the world! Which do you choose?

RUSS: The Wednesday Special, of course. 

DAMIAN: See you down the road?

RUSS: Until then.

We leave Russ there with his Wednesday Special, the weight of the world on his shoulders and the fate of Oxford’s finest in his hands. And what lovely hands they are too. ROLL END CREDITS.

Interview copyright © Damian Michael Barcroft 2020

Stay up to date with all my latest Endeavour cast and crew interviews via twitter @MrDMBarcroft

THE ENDEAVOUR INTERVIEWS 2020: STEPHEN LA RIVIERE

An exclusive Endeavour interview with writer, producer, director, puppet operator and editor Stephen La Rivière

Interview copyright © Damian Michael Barcroft 2020

INT. MOONBASE

Consoles with winking lights. The HERO of MOON RANGERS – square jawed MAJOR.ROCK RENTON with X1 the ANDROID and COLONEL CRATER, crusty old patriarch.

MAJOR RENTON: If only we could access Damian Michael Barcroft’s website from outer space. I wanted to read his interview with Stephen La Rivière about the making of the ‘Moon Rangers’ sequences for ‘Endeavour’.

Some electronic beeps — X1’s ‘VOICE’.

COLONEL CRATER: What did that box of wires and lights say?

MAJOR RENTON: X1 says if we can beam our signal off the asteroid, we might be able to find Barcroft’s Uniform Resource Locator.

COLONEL CRATER: His URL? Great Scott! It’s a billion to one-shot, but it might just work!

(Not quite as originally written – apologies to Russell Lewis)

CUT TO:

DAMIAN: Okay Steve – right, let’s go! Stephen, you’re a producer, director, writer, actor and, of course, a puppeteer best known for your work relating to Gerry and Sylvia Anderson’s Supermarionation style of filmmaking. However, you were born in the eighties so must have missed most of their really iconic shows?

STEPHEN: If we’re talking original transmission, then I missed all of them. However, there was a HUGE revival in the early 90s – and, indeed, again in the early 2000s. It always surprises me that so many people have forgotten about the revivals – which were in many ways more successful than the original transmissions. The Tracy Island toy was the most sought after Christmas present for children both times. And it was quite a feat – perhaps one only really matched by the likes of Disney. Children were tuning into a show made three decades previously and accepting it as something of their time.

Having said that, I discovered the shows slightly ahead of their revival courtesy of my mother who bought a video of Thunderbirds from the bargain bin at Woolworths because she’d liked it when she was a child. And it seems to have been instant love.

DAMIAN: What shows do you remember watching as a kid that had their first broadcast in the eighties and how did they compare to favourites like Thunderbirds?

STEPHEN: On the basis of pure vanity, I’d like to point out that I’m sufficiently young enough to only have a couple of sketchy memories of the 80s as a whole! My memories of 80s shows were largely on repeat – and again they were shows like Thomas the Tank Engine that had artistic appeal that allowed them to live beyond their original audience. Thomas, incidentally, was produced by an ex-Thunderbirds model maker. Of my contemporary shows in the first half of the 90s… I watched stuff like Teenage Mutant Hero Turtles. Stuff that was entertaining enough at the time but no real longevity. I have nostalgia when I catch a glimpse of stuff like The Raggy Dolls etc. But that’s it really. Nostalgia. I wouldn’t watch these shows for enjoyment now – whereas the Gerry and Sylvia shows of the 60s are endlessly watchable.

The early 90s was a golden time to discover great shows of the past. Friday evenings on BBC 2 – Thunderbirds, Stingray, Doctor Who, The Champions, The Man From Uncle. Plus Channel 4 showed The Avengers. In 1996 ITV did a repeat run of Upstairs Downstairs. Lots of kids discovered Doctor Who during this time too – and loved it even though it was in black and white. Great television and films will never die, so long as new audiences are given a chance to see them. That’s the sad thing about Netflix algorithms – it reduces your chance of exposure to stuff you wouldn’t normally look for. Also the idea that ‘modern kids won’t like that’ is a nonsense. Children have no preconceptions at first – they’ll either enjoy something or they won’t. In many ways, they’re less set in their ways than adults. Early exposure is the key though.

DAMIAN: Can you describe your childhood, for example, were there other kids you could share your passion for sci-fi and fantasy with or were you something of an outsider?

STEPHEN: I was an outsider. In more ways than just my interests. Even at the peak of the revival I didn’t know anyone who liked the same things I did. I managed to get one friend briefly into Doctor Who – but I suspect he was as interested in Doctor Who as I was in football during the brief moment I ‘got into’ it. I.E. to have a shared interest. Also, I wasn’t really a sci-fi fan. Probably more of an old television fan. By the age of ten I was as content watching stuff like Upstairs Downstairs or I Claudius – which I believe a certain mutual friend was in – as I was anything sci-fi. My principal loves though were the Supermarionation shows and Doctor Who. My interest in Who has waned over the years, but my Supermarionation love… well. Need I say more? Anyway, the short answer is: no. I didn’t have anyone to share my interests with!

Through Century 21 Films, Stephen co-produced two new documentaries about the stories ‘Four to Doomsday’ and ‘Earthshock’ for the blu-ray release of Peter Davison’s first season of Doctor Who

DAMIAN: Were there certain characters from any of the Anderson productions that you identified with or perhaps aspired to be like?

STEPHEN: Not really. I’ve never really looked for characters who were like me – and my family background and life has been so odd I’d be surprised if I ever saw a character I could directly identify with. Nor have I ever needed it. Television was a great way to find cool people unlike you! Did I aspire to be like a character – yes. I always wanted to be as cool as Scott Tracy. That voice! Thunderbird 1! Unfortunately, some things are out of range. I suppose if I started smoking 50 a day now I might manage to get a voice like Jeff’s.

There’s a message that underpins many of the Supermarionation shows about helping others – and I think that did leave a lasting impression. I was in Japan during the big earthquake in 2011 and I think part of my desire to stay and volunteer was partly driven by that childhood message relayed in almost everything the Andersons made.

DAMIAN: I’d like to talk a little bit about finding an audience or readership and how the internet has opened up so many opportunities. What can you tell me about your first experiences and how these led to the documentaries and books?

STEPHEN: Well, I’m guilty to an extent of piggy-backing on someone else’s audience. The background to my production life really begins with the fact that I had an awful time at school – which culminated in three kids trying to knife me. So I left when I was 15 without any qualifications. And that immediately reduces your options. The great thing though about being an outsider as a child is that it gives you lots of time to watch TV! And so whilst I lack any formal film education, by sheer osmosis I think I learnt a lot about how to make films. DVDs – and consequently DVD extras – were becoming a thing at that time. I found out that Terrahawks was being released on DVD and suggested to the releasing company that they do some interviews. Somehow that led to me making something for them – my first credit. And that led to making more behind the scenes programmes. So my audience was stolen really.

I got a bit disillusioned with production in 2008 so gave it up permanently. I wrote my book Filmed in Supermarionation the same year – and then in 2010 moved to Japan. So the last five years back in the world of film, television and advertising has been a bit of a surprise. I was tempted back on a one-off basis because I was offered the chance to turn Filmed in Supermarionation into a documentary. Which in turn has led into something of a Supermarionation revival when we produced three new episodes of Thunderbirds for the 50th anniversary of the show. And my goal with that was not just to celebrate the past but to bring a new audience to what I believe is an art-form that is both beautiful and bonkers!

DAMIAN: In addition to the old cliché about being in the right place at the right time, to what extent would you agree that there’s usually some sort of kind mentor along the journey that helps with making contacts or offers sage advice?

STEPHEN: The self-made man is a myth. We all get through life with the help – and sometimes hindrance – of others. When I did the Terrahawks DVD extras I was out of my depth really. Kevin Davies – who designed the Terrahawks titles – was by then a documentary maker. He immediately clocked that I could do with some help. But he never humiliated me – just gave me little tips about things I could do. So I owe him a lot. And along the way there have been lots of people who have helped me. Including some who I met because I wanted to interview them. Thunderbirds director David Elliott, playwright Rosemary Anne Sisson, actress Jean Marsh, composer Alexander Faris – people I went to meet once, who then helped me in immeasurable ways. Like everyone else I’d like to believe that I’m completely in control, but I think the most you can hope for in life is to be the captain of a boat in stormy seas. You push in certain directions, but the tempestuous waves of a million different factors – people, circumstances, chemicals in your brain – earthquakes! – take you to places you wouldn’t normally end up.

DAMIAN: Well, Russell Lewis, being a huge fan of the Anderson productions himself, greatly admired your work and told me that he pointed the Endeavour team to you. How did you first hear the news that they wanted you to film the Moon Rangers sequences and what was your reaction?

STEPHEN: I got an e-mail one day from the producer, Deanne Cunningham. ‘I’m the producer of an ITV drama. I am trying to contact Stephen La Rivière about an episode we are currently planning involving supermarionation style puppetry. It would be great to speak to you about this if you have the time.’

I can’t imagine not having the time for something like this!

It was very exciting. The life of a freelancer is so often waiting for the e-mail or letter that will start a new adventure. A couple of days passed before I found out what it was about – during which time I’d resigned myself to the fact that maybe someone else had got the job. Not that we have any competitors as such as it’s such a specialised field, but the thought is always there.

When I found out and read the script I was very excited, but also worried. Linking up with another crew can produce problems. We worked on an advert for the Halifax in 2016 and I made the error of allowing them to choose the crew who would work under our advice. The crew were perfectly accomplished – but they’d never made anything like this before. The original Supermarionation crew were very clever. And it’s very difficult to film these puppets and models if you don’t know all the tricks that were used by the original Century 21 Films team. The Halifax crew – not used to practical miniature work – couldn’t understand why they weren’t getting the right results with their usual techniques and consequently it was a very stressful experience. So I was worried about a repeat of that experience.

And so as to rob this story of any tension and drama – Endeavour was the best experience possible. Just wonderful people to work with.

DAMIAN: So, you’ve got the job. Can you take me through the process of how you prepared the Moon Rangers sequences including the design of the characters, their costumes, sets and vehicles?

STEPHEN: We all met in London for an initial meeting and discussed ideas and approaches. I think to begin with both sides preferred to have greater control – which is completely natural. Production is difficult, stressful and costly and you want to get people you can rely on. So naturally they favoured as many of their own crew and I favoured as many of mine. What we ended up with though was a collaboration that – I think – worked out perfectly. My initial preference was that we should build the main set as the scale is really important, but understandably Paul Cripps [production designer] wanted to do that. And taking on board our advice I think he came up with something fantastic. It looks great on camera, whilst having the right sort of aesthetic.

On the flip side, Paul originally planned to do the puppets, but it made more sense for us to build them as our puppet makers are the experts in this particular style of marionette and we wanted to ensure everything worked as we needed. Though, having said that, we still managed to have a mechanical malfunction on the day that nearly drove me to a nervous breakdown. Which is something else I’d like to praise the Endeavour team for. I warned them that these puppets are very temperamental and reshoot time would be essential if needed. All of that was taken into consideration – which makes the whole experience so much easier.

So Paul designed the main puppet set – which matched aesthetically what I really wanted to go for. Even though the episode was set in 1969, I felt that Russell has perfectly caught in the dialogue the essence of Fireball XL5 and Stingray – which had that sort of weird late 50s / early 60s hybrid look.

Rock Renton and below: Steve Zodiac (Fireball XL5), Troy Tempest (Stingray) and Scott Tracy (Thunderbirds)

Paul also gave us sketches as to how he envisaged the characters. Rock Renton was made specially for the show by top sculptor Stephen Mansfield who sculpts all our new characters. Stephen took Paul’s design as a starting point and then translated that into the pre-set proportions of a Supermarionation puppet whilst adding a few influences from the original characters. I was really happy with the look of Rock Renton – he seemed to embody Steve Zodiac, Troy Tempest and Scott Tracy somehow. Once the sculpt was done and approved puppet maker Barry Davies built the puppet and installed all the mechanisms.

X1

The X1 Robot was again built following Paul’s initial design – but with slight changes that occurred as a result of using ordinary household objects. The head, for instance, is a paint pot! He was built by our effects team of Toby Chamberlain and Hilton Fitzsimmons and operated by Elliot Pavelin.

Luna
Colonel Crater

Luna and Colonel Crater followed Paul’s ideas more by chance than design in that we already had puppets that looked right. Paul wanted Colonel Crater to look like Morse creator Colin Dexter. We agreed that an existing puppet – who we’d had built for the new Thunderbirds episodes we’d made in 2015 – again sculpted by Stephen Mansfield – looked the part. Because of the pre-determined proportions of the earlier Supermarionation puppets, you can never really do an exact copy – so you aim to capture the essence. And the puppet previously known as Dawkins seemed just right for the job.

Luna was a previously unused puppet – sculpted for (and deleted from) the Halifax advert by Marina and Lady Penelope creator Mary Turner. Given Luna is an homage to Marina it seemed almost serendipitous that we could provide a puppet sculpted by the same person.

Paul also included some costume sketches. The costumes were made by our costume lady, Liz Comstock-Smith. She followed Paul’s design for the main uniform, whilst the final look of Luna was influenced by some rather fabulous flowing fabric Liz found. Supermarionation is a very organic process – whatever you set out to do morphs across the different elements of production. Not just because of the creative whims of the team – but because the puppets are so specific in what they require. In the case of the costumes, the fabric and construction has to be perfect to allow the puppet to move freely.

On the special effects front, the rocket was kit-bashed by Hilton Fitzsimmons who built two models – just in case we needed to blow up two. Paul arranged the staging and drapes needed for the SFX shots – and had some rather nice moon craters built. The stage was dressed with sand for the drama shots – but we substituted that for other materials when it came to the effects shot itself for a better effect.

We were on set for a week in total. The drama sequences were shot on the Wednesday and Thursday – and then we took over the stage to shoot Moon Rangers. Both puppet and model sequences were shot on a vintage Mitchell on 35mm film by Boyd Skinner our expert DOP who knows all of the lighting and lensing requirements. Malcolm Smith came into do the pyrotechnics (which were very loud). Again, Malcolm is an expert in producing the right sort of explosions that work in miniature. He also has to plan out the timing of each shot precisely because we shoot at high speed. So a 5 second detonation is in fact only 1 second in real life.

The model shots were done in sections. The landing and initial detonation, the collapse, and then various shots of detonation – which had to culminated in the foam of the extinguisher in order to take us back into the main drama. I was very conscious that we were an elaborate, but small part of a big drama and tried to make sure as much as possible that our bits would integrate into the main action.

I can’t stress enough how much of a genuine collaborative effort this was. We were all in constant touch checking with each other that we were getting what we wanted. From my side, I wanted to be providing the show with what its production team wanted. From their side, they were respectful of making sure that I got the things I needed to make sure we ended up with an authentic looking, affectionate homage – not a badly made parody that cheapened the original shows.

I hope that what we ended up with is a true marriage between Russell’s written vision, Shaun’s directorial vision, Paul’s design vision and my vision of how to do new Supermarionation work that doesn’t harm the original shows, but brings a new audience. And given the reaction online – I think we succeeded. In the year since Apollo went out, we’ve been inundated with requests not just to bring Thunderbirds back, but to do full series of Moon Rangers!

Stephen with David Elliott and Mary Turner above them

DAMIAN: How did puppeteer Mary Turner and director David Elliott who both worked on the original Thunderbirds become involved?

STEPHEN: I’ve known Mary and David for the best part of 20 years – I first met them as a young fan wanting to know how the shows were made. Going to Mary for puppeteering seemed natural – not just because she was there, but because she understands television puppeteering. It needs to be subtle as the camera amplifies everything. She was joined by Géraldine Donaldson as the supervisor (she ensures that all the puppets are prepared, dressed, styled and working) and Elliot Pavelin – who worked as a lip-sync operator and puppeteer. Although to be honest we all do a bit of everything really. My co-producer Andrew T. Smith not only looks after the running of the whole operation, but puppeteers, lip-sync operates, sorts out camera problems. We all have to be all rounders!

As for David when we began production on the three anniversary specials of Thunderbirds, he asked if he could direct one. It hadn’t occurred me to ask because it’s a huge strain and he was 84. I hesitantly agreed and… he sat down in the chair and five decades fell away. It was like he’d never been away. He did some amazing work for us.

For Endeavour, I wanted to puppeteer too, and so it made sense to have David on set too. Originally it was to have a second pair of eyes focussed just on the action to make sure we were getting everything – but he’s so full of good ideas it can’t help but be a collaboration. So even though I got sole credit, it was actually both of us – some shots are his, some are mine. One of the shots was actually the idea of my co-producer, Andrew T. Smith. It really is a very collaborative process. If someone’s got a good idea we use it!

It wasn’t just David and Mary – David Graham, the voice of Parker, provided (uncredited) the voice of Colonel Crater. Mary and David Elliott are in their 80s, and David Graham is in his 90s – so I think I might have the oldest working film crew out there!

The dialogue was recorded at Hackenbacker in London. Nigel Heath gave us a fantastic 60s microphone set-up so we could get the authentic sound. Justin T. Lee provided – again uncredited – the Scott Tracy-esque voice of Rock Renton.

DAMIAN: What was Shaun Evans like to work with as an actor and a director?

STEPHEN: As I said earlier on, one of my great concerns about this was having a repeat of the Halifax experience – trying to work through another director. But Shaun said that I should direct the Moon Rangers bit as it was a specialised form of filmmaking. So my level of respect for him is huge. Not every filmmaker has the lack of ego to be able to say, ‘Actually, it would be better if we let this person do this bit’.

That’s not to say Shaun had no involvement – everything done was to service his show. But ultimately, this was one long special effects sequence involving specialised knowledge and it was fantastic that we were allowed to get on and do the things we needed to do.

A specialised sequence like this – in the middle of a big production with its down demands – could have been a nightmare to get right. But it was just a pleasure. Nearly two years on, I’m still surprised to be able to say that as it’s so unusual!

DAMIAN: Who gave the best performance – the puppets or the human actors?

STEPHEN: Given that Rock Renton broke down – mechanically, rather than mentally – for three hours on the shoot day, I’d say the actors. Definitely more reliable. Though, like many temperamental stars, I don’t think any of Rock’s problems showed up on screen.

I would like to highlight one puppet performance though that I loved – Colonel Crater collapsing. Mary Turner operated Crater and her comic timing reduced everyone to fits of laughter. Which on a stressful, complicated day is something we all needed!

DAMIAN: Russ visited the studios at Twickenham for two days and said that they were amongst the happiest he’s ever spent on the show. However, from your perspective, I wonder if having the writer there watching you perform was a little nerve-racking?

STEPHEN: I think many creatives suffer from Impostor Syndrome. The idea that you shouldn’t be there. So on that basis, I like keeping everyone away so I have time to fix the problems before anyone notices. And boy – do the puppets come with lots of problems. Paul Cripps suddenly wandered onto the set unexpectedly when we were having problems with Renton – and I wanted to die from shame. I mean, I know the puppets come with these problems – they either work beautifully, or they’re bastards. Even Gerry used to call them ‘little bastards’. But it worries me that to people who don’t do this on a daily basis that they think it’s incompetence, rather than the nature of this type of fiddly filmmaking.

I was delighted Russell could come down. Not least so I could express my admiration for the script which I think is genuinely very clever. In one minute it totally distills the essence of those shows. And it’s enormously quotable. Amongst my crew it’s easily the production we reference the most.

DAMIAN: You know, I think Russ actually found the experience very moving and not just because he’s a fan of Stingray, Thunderbirds and the other Anderson shows, but he told me that watching you work reminded him of when he was a kid making 8mm stop-motion films with Action Men. Essentially, as an artist, would you agree that you’re not only operating the puppets, but also gently holding people’s childhoods in your hands?

STEPHEN: Yes! Absolutely. And I’m very conscious of that in everything we do. We’re playing in a toy-box that deserves respect. My only intention with everything we do is that we tell the audience – new and old – that these shows were fantastic. Of everything we’ve done, I think Moon Rangers has done the most to promote that idea. We have big plans for Supermarionation – and Moon Rangers has really helped us on that path.

DAMIAN: Was it your idea for Russ to have the little cameo?

STEPHEN: Actually, I think it was Géraldine’s idea – our puppetry supervisor. The hand insert wasn’t in the script – but the script made quite a bit about the human sized props. So I thought it’d be fun to do a human hand sequence not least because everyone remembers them. But also, it would serve the main drama plot. As we were preparing for the shot Géraldine said, ‘Wouldn’t it be a nice idea to give Russ a cameo?’ So she went away and made a sleeve for him out of a bit of the remaining puppet costume material and he came onto the set to play Rock Renton. It’s a lovely touch. We were also able to film a bit of Russell on set with the puppets as we were at the end of the reel – hopefully a nice memento for him of the day.

Thinking about that day I feel so warm towards the experience. That’s the magic of these puppets – despite the frustrations of production – there is just a magic of stepping onto those sets and seeing the characters live.

DAMIAN: What’s next for you and Century 21?

STEPHEN: Stand by for action… We’ll be back. We just can’t say anything about it yet!

DAMIAN: Stephen, thank you very much indeed.

STEPHEN: No, thank you. I’m not blind to the fact we were 1 minute of a much-loved series. But as I’ve said to everyone else until their eyes glaze over, I loved the whole thing. Normally old work makes you wince – but I’m hugely proud of my tiny part in Endeavour.

Interview copyright © Damian Michael Barcroft 2020

Stay up to date with all my latest Endeavour cast and crew interviews via twitter @MrDMBarcroft

THE ENDEAVOUR INTERVIEWS 2020: RUSSELL LEWIS PART II

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

Interview copyright © Damian Michael Barcroft 2020

Special thanks to Stephen La Rivière

INT. VENDING MACHINE AREA/NEW COWLEY POLICE STATION

BRIGHT at his solitary repast – nosing through a newspaper with an APOLLO HEADLINE. THURSDAY arrives.

THURSDAY: Giving the canteen a miss today, sir?

BRIGHT: I was just… uh… (re the Apollo headline) Extraordinary thing.

THURSDAY: Yes, it is. Hell of a thing. Brave as you like. I was a boy when Alcock and Brown crossed the Atlantic. Everybody said that couldn’t be done. Fifty years on, and it’s the moon.

BRIGHT: ‘Man’s reach’, Thursday.

DAMIAN: Russ, what do you remember of July 1969?

RUSS: My chief recollection is peering at a black and white TV and trying to make sense of the images thereon. Was the touchdown beamed back live – or is my mind playing tricks? The pictures were quite difficult to process for my young mind. Quite abstract. Oblique views of the lunar surface.

But there was a great air of excitement about it all. My maternal grandmother was as old as the century, and it’s mad to think her life encompassed both the Wright Brothers first powered flight, and then – sixty-six years later – she was still alive to watch men walk on the moon. Quite staggering. Having seen Alan Tracy do his thing in Thunderbird 3, one might have been a bit blasé about it, assuming that – ‘well, of course, the moon is nothing special. Thunderbird 3 goes there all the time.’

E/I. THE MOON/SOUNDSTAGE/HEAVISIDE STUDIOS

The surface of the moon. Pockmarked with craters. Buzz Aldrin’s ‘Magnificent desolation.’ The blast of deceleration rockets – and a spaceship descends to the surface.

The space-ship crashes in a tremendous explosion… A moment – and a couple of STAGEHANDS enter frame with fire extinguishers to put out the flames… WIDE – and we see the MOON is a model set.

DAMIAN: The second film of series 6, APOLLO, was something of a love letter to Gerry Anderson and the Supermarionation style of filmmaking. Can you tell me what shows like Thunderbirds and Stingray meant to you as a child?

RUSS: I guess, along with the films of Ray Harryhausen, they furnished my imagination. I would have watched them in black and white, I suppose – first time round. Like most of the country, not having a colour TV. But, yes, I was completely in thrall to the worlds created in each of those shows.

DAMIAN: Also, some of the puppets such as Lady Penelope and Marina were strangely alluring to young boys weren’t they?

RUSS: Marina, perhaps. Lady Penelope… not so much. As a child I found her rhotacism a bit off-putting. I was fascinated by the imagery in the end credits of Stingray – across the “Marina” theme. Exquisitely shot. These felt like images that could have come from a big budget, high production value movie. I don’t know if I’ve mentioned it before, but the mood and imagery for Pulp’s Hardcore video has been a bit of a touchstone across the last couple of Series — which in turn took its inspiration from a coffee table book called Still Life edited by Diane Keaton (yup!) and Marvin Heiferman. I’ve got a pretty battered copy, but it’s filled with stills and publicity shots from Hollywood movies between 1940 and ‘69. There’s something very strange and staged about those shots – oddly lifeless and artificial — and often sinister, in a kind of David Lynch/Twin Peaks way. There’s something about the kind of world that they’re trying to depict which rings utterly hollow. They’re what the mind of someone who has lived an unsophisticated life imagines the sophisticated life to be. Do you know what I mean? It’s like what children imagine a King’s life to be. Ice cream for breakfast, lunch and supper, delivered on silver salvers by periwigged flunkies in buckled shoes – illustrated by Quentin Blake.

And… this does get back to Marina and Lady Penelope, I promise you… In the UK, there was that same brittle Soho glamour abroad after the war. Telephone accents. Ruth Ellis. It’s there in Betjeman’s Song of a Nightclub Proprietress — that piss elegance that pretends to something it isn’t. Del Boy Trotter’s ‘Bonnet de douche’. That’s probably a bit unfair on Del Boy – but Hyacinth Bucket is close to the mark. And I think that’s certainly true of Lady Penelope. It’s a suburban imagining of the aristocracy. Ha! You remember that scene with Jane Fonda in Klute where she goes and monologues the fantasy of the old gentleman in the Garment Factory. He’s come from the old country, and the fantasy is all about Fonda’s trip to the gambling tables of Monte Carlo, it’s all dripping with Euro decadence and the ‘pagan’ feelings stirred in her by some older man in the casino. And it’s a fantastic scene – but again, it’s that level of pretence. It’s no accident Lady Penelope ends up in Monte in The Man from MI.5. And that’s there in the Marina montage as well. Candles melting in a Chianti bottle. A vision of glamour that most of us could only dream about in the UK. But it was bogus. Ersatz. Rank Charm – as they say.

DAMIAN: You visited filming at Twickenham studios for a couple of days and I believe the first was with Shaun directing the human actors. You’ve obviously known Shaun for a long time now but what he is like as a director?

RUSS: Thorough. Prepared.

DAMIAN: Did the two of you have any significant creative differences on this film?

RUSS: Not that I recall, specifically. But what goes on tour…

DAMIAN: Shaun’s first foray into directing was a couple of years ago now, do you think he always had ambitions to direct an episode of Endeavour and why do you think he wanted to direct this particular film?

RUSS: Well – he didn’t want to open the batting – first time out, and the only film available to him to direct was the second in the run.

DAMIAN: Have you ever thought of having a go behind the camera?

RUSS: I’m already insufferable enough.

DAMIAN: Not you, sir. The second day of filming at Twickenham involved the puppet sequences. Now, I’ve often tried to get you to pick a favourite child and you always refuse. However, you must have something of a special soft spot for this film?

RUSS: I enjoyed the puppets very much. Getting up close and personal with Stephen La Rivière’s wonders. His team is fantastic, and I could happily spend the rest of my days doing nothing but working with them. What I adored was that it took me back to making my own 8mm stop-motion films as a kid. Then – Action Men were my cast, brilliantly poseable for animation – but it was in essence ‘bringing one’s toys to life.’ And there was an element of that with the puppets and the vehicles. Obviously, compared to the budget they’d had on the commercials they’d done, we could offer nothing like the same resources — but, clearly, when they’d been doing their Thunderbirds at 50 films, I don’t think they were awash with money, which brings me to my point — they have retained a very healthy sense of make do and mend, and most importantly, the only thing that matters is what’s in the frame. Does it tick all the rules boxes? No. Does it work? Does it look fantastic? Absolutely. That chimed very happily with my approach to making things. I adore sleight of hand. The movie and TV magic. What you thought you saw, you did not see.

He and they have such a genuine reverence for the original way of doing things, and a touching affection for those who broke that ground first time around… Having David Elliot and Mary Turner on the floor – and seeing Mary manipulating the puppets from the ‘Bridge’ over the set, as she had done for Anderson nearly sixty years ago… For those of us to whom such a moment might mean something… It was extraordinarily moving.

DAMIAN: Is this why you chose this film to make your first and only onscreen appearance?

RUSS: First do no harm. It was Stephen’s idea. And it kind of fed back into the make do and mend approach. At first, I think, we’d built the cut to the human hand into the story – and explained it in dialogue as part of the plot. There was a lot more about guns and blanks and live rounds early on, as a way of explaining why more than one person would have tested positive for firearms residue. But there we are. I was always very conscious as a kid of the cut to the live human hand pulling a lever or pushing a switch – and I think I wrote about that in the stage directions. Geraldine – Stephen’s colleague at Century 21 Films – had an offcut of material left over from Renton and Crater’s costumes – literally, a fragment of cloth, perhaps with a bit of braiding, was it? – and I was sewn into that to create a bit of cuff. Just enough to deceive. The ONLY thing that matters is what’s in frame. And away I went. A career in hand modelling beckons… And not a moment too soon.

DAMIAN: Can you describe the atmosphere on set with Stephen La Rivière and Century 21 working their magic?

RUSS: Well, as I think I’ve mentioned, it meant a lot. To be on the floor with Stephen and his team, and of course David and Mary. Really was amongst the happiest days I’ve spent on the show. That the shoot took place during the heatwave merely added to the fun of it. The studio – with the lights blazing – was stifling. We were the Alec Guinness Bridge on the River Kwai ‘Sweatbox’ Re-Enactment Society. As the late, great Neil Innes said when I saw him play at the Marquee some forty years ago, ‘The sweat’s running down the cheeks of my arse like juice from a rhubarb tart.’ But if I could spend the rest of my days doing that… it would be no contest.

DAMIAN: You mention Barry Gray’s music in the script and his contribution to the Anderson productions can’t be overstated. Any particular favourite themes or songs?

RUSS: Stingray is sensational. And I’m very fond of Joe 90.  The organ line is marvellous. I also like the vocal version of Captain Scarlet by The Spectrum – who supposedly performed it (or mimed to it) on The Golden Shot. I’d love to know if there was any truth in that. The vocalist to my ear always sounds like Ray Brooks – who narrated Mister Benn. Marina is a stone cold classic. The mighty Thunderbirds theme. But with a lot of these, it’s the incidental music that haunts the mind. Some of the stuff on The Uninvited – the strange Thunderbirds story set around a pyramid.  Madly, I always feel like I catch echoes of it in some of the arrangements in The Specials early work — Ghost Town in particular – those brass stabs, and the flute figure always sound very Thunderbirds to my ears. Barry Gray’s music did so much of the heavy lifting in terms of mood and scene setting. In much the same way that our own Barry – and now, of course, Matt Slater – bring so much to Endeavour. Their music has saved our blushed more times than I can remember.

DAMIAN: Was it the idea to incorporate the Apollo 11 moon landing or the Supermarionation aspects of the story that came first?

RUSS: Oh – the Moon Landing. It would have been a natural exit point for the series as a whole – as the pinnacle of human achievement.

INT. SOUNDSTAGE/HEAVISIDE STUDIOS

A puppet Moonbase. Consoles with winking lights. The HERO of MOON RANGERS – square jawed MAJOR.ROCK RENTON in a scene with X1 the ANDROID (a ROBOT), LUNARA – one of the Moon People; and COLONEL CRATER, crusty old patriarch.

COLONEL CRATER: Barbara’s not only my daughter, Major, but she’s also a renowned Astro-Physicist in her own right.

MAJOR RENTON: I warned her not to go, Colonel. Now, she’s out there somewhere on the dark side, with only thirty minutes of oxygen left.

COLONEL CRATER: Don’t blame yourself, Rock. She was determined to get that space-flu vaccine through to the miners at Station X19…

DAMIAN: Tell me about creating these characters, the choice of names and if you needed to do much research or does hokey dialogue just come naturally?

RUSS: They were kind of Stingray-ish, really, weren’t they? Alliterative for Troy Tempest/Rock Renton. The name Renton had stuck in my head for fifty years — I think there was a character called Rod Renton in either Secret of Zarb or The Terror of Tiba – these little books I had when I was a kid. Spitfire Books. I’m not sure if they were for younger readers or just pulpy – but they were all genres… cowboy, war, adventure… and the pair in question were sort of secret agenty. The kind of story where each of the buddy-buddy heroes had alliterative names.

DAMIAN: Note the book logo – Tigers were everywhere in the 60s.
RUSS: I think the chap in the fez and robes on the cover fed into stage directions for supporting artists at Bixby’s party in RIDE. We just added the horse-hair fly-swatter. A shilling!  Money well spent.

And Crater was a version of Commander Shore from Stingray. What we were reaching for with Moon Rangers though was a show that had already passed its sell-by date. Anderson had moved away – with Captain Scarlet – from the larger headed marionettes of the earlier productions to more properly proportioned puppets. And it was important for us that our studio – Heaviside – was still flying the old flag – that it was slipping behind the times. I know Stephen La Rivière has much greater affection for the Stingray/Thunderbirds era puppets. And I do see his point. While Scarlet and Joe 90 were much more realistically proportioned, it was at a cost of what could be done. The puppets in those two shows ‘walk’ or move far less than those in Thunderbirds and Stingray. You’ve got Lieutenant Green on his slidey chair – and Colonel White behind his rotating desk. They’re much more static. It’s a choice. You feel the later shows, including The Secret Service from 69 – which was half live action, half puppetry – were consciously trying to shake off their origins. I liked the darkness of Scarlet a lot, and I’d dearly love to find a way to deliver a version of it — but the artistry and scale of Stingray, together with the hopeful message of Thunderbirds, really makes them the yardstick, and what people tend to think of when they think of Century 21. The particular gait of the puppets, which has been providing comedians with much mileage for over half a century. News recently came through of the death of Alan Patillo at the age of 90. Writer and director for many of Anderson’s shows – his work was quite remarkable. In tribute, Stephen tweeted a link to the climax of The Perils of Penelope. Really — it’s a masterclass in suspense. Absolutely brilliant. A sequence of which Hitchcock or Spielberg would be proud.

DAMIAN: Jeff Slayton, CEO of the fictional Heaviside studios, describes Moon Rangers as a sort of ‘Bonanza in space’ which, of course, reminded me of Star Trek. Now, you often mention the Prime Directive whenever I ask a question regarding Endeavour’s past – typically with reference to Susan Fallon. I obviously understand that the Prime Directive in Star Trek means that Starfleet personnel are forbidden from interfering with the natural development of alien civilisations but can you clarify what is meant when you use it in reference to the Morse universe?

RUSS: It’s [also] Doc Brown’s warning to Marty, isn’t it?  We can’t do anything in the past which might change the future.

DAMIAN: Will Susan Fallon ever appear in Endeavour?

RUSS: Well, she sort of already has. She is standing in the group of mourners at her father’s funeral. We just didn’t pick her out or have her see Endeavour, as it felt that might undermine what they have to say to each other in Dead on Time.

LAZARETTO (S4:E3)

DAMIAN: Of course, APOLLO wasn’t all puppets and explosions, and although we’ll discuss some of the key moments regarding Endeavour and Thursday when we conclude our discussion on the themes of alienation, change, guilt and paranoia next time, I wanted to highlight two of my favourite scenes in this script. The first continues from where we began earlier at the vending machine:

THURSDAY: All well, sir?

BRIGHT: A sobering thing to discover so late in life that one is considered a fool.

THURSDAY: Not you, sir.

BRIGHT: Oh, yes. I’m under no illusion. I am a figure of ridicule. To be openly mocked and scorned. (off THURSDAY) This Pelican! — is an albatross around my neck. Someone even mentioned it to Mrs.Bright at Canasta the other evening. People laugh at me behind my back, and even to my face.

THURSDAY: More fool them. Seems to me we’re in the business of keeping the Queen’s Peace and preserving life and limb. This campaign of yours – you’ll probably never know how many lives you’ve saved. Hundreds. Thousands, maybe – by the time it’s done.

BRIGHT: I’ve always been able to rely on you. Well — I must meet a representation from the Oxford traders. Up in arms over parking restrictions.

BRIGHT goes. THURSDAY watches after him.

DAMIAN: Wonderfully played by both actors but Anton’s pause after ‘I’ve always been able to rely on you’ and the poignant look on his face was so moving and beautiful. Now, correct me if I’m wrong but this is the sort of scene, maybe because it doesn’t involve Endeavour or drive the mystery plot forward, that might easily have been deleted in the earlier days of the show. However, I’m confused as to why the following brilliant “best not go there…” scene which does feature Endeavour was not filmed in its entirety and much of the really insightful dialogue not included. Was this simply because of our old enemy screentime or a creative difference perhaps?

INT. CID/NEW COWLEY POLICE STATION

THURSDAY and BOX in BOX’s office. ENDEAVOUR and JOAN keeping an eye on FLORA and MATTHEW — sister helping her brother with his drawing on a blotter. JOAN at the window – eye on the glimpse of moon in the darkened sky.

JOAN: Mad to think there’s people up there. Right now. That someone could have looked out of the window like this and thought – ‘Right. We’re going there.’

ENDEAVOUR: “This was the prized, the desirable sight…” (off JOAN) Sorry. Being clever again. It’s always occupied the human imagination. Understandable, I suppose. But strange, all the same.

JOAN: Strange?

ENDEAVOUR: That something so far away and seemingly out of reach could bear so great an influence on one’s life. Even when you can’t see it. It’s still there. (best not go there…)

RUSS: It was shot. Shaun didn’t care for it and asked me to write another scene – which is the one that was broadcast.

DAMIAN: Finally, what can you tell us about tonight’s film, RAGA?

RUSS: The 1970 General Election is a backdrop. All in Wrestling has a part to play. Greeks Bearing Gifts had a notional influence upon it. It features an Indian restaurant, so probably best avoided by those who bleat about ‘Political correctness gone mad.’

DAMIAN: Just one more thing; you’re having tea with a friend and there are two cakes left on the plate – a large one of a kind you very much like, and a smaller, dry looking one. Which do you choose?

RUSS: Neither. I’ve never been fussed about cake.

DAMIAN: Please yourself.

Interview copyright © Damian Michael Barcroft 2020

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So, Russ is a hand model now is he? Hmm…