Pilot

June 1965, and Oxford is still a place where the dreaming spires make it hard to believe anything bad could happen underneath them. Then fifteen-year-old Mary Tremlett is found dead, her boyfriend apparently a suicide, and the City Police are pulled into something much bigger than two sad deaths.

Young DC Endeavour Morse is on the case alongside DI Fred Thursday, his superior, who spots the awkward young constable as a detective he can trust and takes him under his wing. Nobody involved knows it yet, but that is the start of one of the great partnerships in British crime drama.

What the two of them find is a network of illegal sex parties, with under-age girls procured for the men who run Oxford: politicians, businessmen, dons, and police officers. The respectable names keep surfacing, and every one of them seems to have friends in the right places. Morse and Thursday keep pushing anyway, and the case is brought to a successful conclusion, though the smell of it lingers well past the final scene.

Russell Lewis wrote it, Colm McCarthy directed. Shaun Evans is Morse, all brains and blink; Patrick Malahide is Richard Lovell, one of the men in the frame. Michael Matus plays Cyril Wright, John Light is Dempsey, Flora Montgomery is Rosalind Stromming, and Jack Ashton is DC Ian McLeash. Daisy Head plays Jenny Crisp, Holly Ridley is Valerie Quillen, Lisa Backwell plays Anne Porter, and Jenna Harrison is Miss Sylvia Tench.

There is a scene where the camera just watches Morse's face while the respectable men of Oxford lie smoothly, and it tells you everything about the series to come. The period dressing is careful, the jazz on the soundtrack is right, and the city looks the way it should: beautiful and slightly rotten underneath.

The pilot works as a whodunit and works just as well as a portrait of class hypocrisy. And it lays the groundwork for everything that follows, both the cases and the bond between the two men at the centre of them.