Rocket

September 1965, and Princess Margaret is coming to Oxford to unveil the British Imperial Electric Company's new "Standfast" Mark Two missile at the Cowley factory. Chief Superintendent Bright is on red alert, the whole city is dressed for the occasion, and Endeavour Morse, still stuck on general duties, is excluded from the lot of it.

Once the ceremony closes, the real drama starts on the shop floor. An unpopular worker, Percy Malleson, is found murdered in a secluded corner of the factory. The owners, the Broom family, turn out to be as dysfunctional as any household in the county, and one of Malleson's colleagues, Lenny Frost, carries bad blood with him over an industrial accident. Then there is Alice Vexin, the boss's secretary, an old acquaintance from Morse's university days, and the less said about the effect she has on his concentration the better.

Morse has to pursue the truth, and then justice, from the sidelines, with the royal visit still ticking away in the background. It is a neat trick the show pulls here: national spectacle on one side of the wall, a family's dirty linen on the other, and the same man in the middle of both.

Russell Lewis wrote it, Craig Viveiros directed. James Merry is Percy Malleson, Rosalind Halstead is Estella Broom, Jack Roth is Lenny Frost, James Northcote is Johnny Broom, Martin Jarvis is Henry Broom, and Craig Parkinson is Reg Tracepurcel. Anton Lesser plays Chief Superintendent Reginald Bright, Roger Allam is DI Fred Thursday, Maimie McCoy is Alice Vexin, and Darwin Shaw plays Crown Prince Nabil.

The royal visit gives the episode its deadline and its comic relief in equal measure; Bright's nerves alone are worth the price of admission. The factory floor, by contrast, is all grease and grudges, and that contrast is the whole episode in miniature.

It remains a pleasure to watch Endeavour swing between the grand sweep of a royal unveiling and the intensely human messiness of a family-run factory. The missile gets the headlines; the murder gets the better scenes.