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After Endeavour: Where to See Roger Allam

ByDavid

Roger Allam
Roger Allam

Roger Allam spent decades as a dependable heavyweight on the British stage, working with the RSC and the National. Television made Endeavour's DI Fred Thursday his signature part from 2012 to 2023.

Thursday was the silver-back mentor to the young Morse. Allam's other crime appearances form a small but select record.

They include an arms dealer in Between the Lines and a role in Morse's penultimate case. Waking the Dead cast him as a grieving father; Foyle's War made him a wartime profiteer.

He gives men of appetite and authority the same creamy certainty. These appearances show both registers before Thursday.

Between the Lines · S03E08

Free Trade

First broadcast 1994-12-07 · Roger Allam as Peter Adams

A drug-related shooting leaves the usual wreckage and Clark's team picks up the pieces, but the episode's real business is the arms job Clark and Naylor are setting up — proper money, too dangerous, Connell wants in anyway. Allam is Peter Adams in the study of the price of ambition that runs underneath Siobhan Redmond's finest hour as Connell.

Between the Lines · S03E09

The End User (1)

First broadcast 1994-12-14 · Roger Allam as Peter Adams

Belgium, a neo-fascist rally doubling as an illegal-arms marketplace, and Clark undercover as the kind of right-wing dealer the room trusts. Allam's Peter Adams belongs to the operation with the tension of a wire being pulled taut — the first rule of the show being that undercover work goes wrong, and two Irish buyers arriving with their own agendas to prove it.

Inspector Morse · S00E03

Death Is Now My Neighbour

First broadcast 1997-11-19 · Roger Allam as Denis Cornford

A young physiotherapist shot through her kitchen window, a neighbour killed by the same gun a day later, and Morse noticing what everyone missed: no number 13 on the drive. Allam is Denis Cornford in the 1997 special that climbs to Lonsdale College's mastership contest — the penultimate Morse story, and one of the best, with the killer working from a list and counting wrong.

Waking the Dead · S02E07

Thin Air (1)

First broadcast 2002-11-03 · Roger Allam as Benjamin Gold

The dress Joanna Gold was wearing when she vanished from Hampstead Heath in 1989 turns up in a lock-up, and a disappearance the whole of London remembers becomes a murder hunt. Allam is Benjamin Gold, the father, opposite Cherie Lunghi's Leah, in an episode good at showing how much a family can be bent out of shape by one afternoon in a park full of people.

Waking the Dead · S02E08

Thin Air (2)

First broadcast 2002-11-04 · Roger Allam as Benjamin Gold

Boyd's mishandled hunt catches up with him as the murderer starts stalking the dead girl's younger sister — and the episode produces the plan that only exists in dramas and occasionally in real life, Clara persuading Boyd to let her wear her sister's red dress onto the Heath as bait. Allam's Benjamin Gold watches the investigation his family's tragedy bent out of shape lurch toward its own disaster.

Foyle's War · S01E04

Eagle Day

First broadcast 2002-11-17 · Roger Allam as Group Captain Alastair Graeme

August 1940, the air war arriving on the south coast: a lorry driver dead in a bombed-out house with a gold locket in his hand and a cargo that is not what the manifest says — museum pieces moved for safety that may include items never catalogued. Allam is Group Captain Alastair Graeme in the episode whose title takes its name from the German offensive against Britain's radar chain. The show's episode pages are not yet on the site, so this one travels without its link.