Canticle

1967, and the permissive society has come under attack in the person of Joy Pettybon, moral crusader and author of the 'Keep Britain Decent' campaign, who has come to Oxford to appear on the nightly television show The Almanac and has been receiving threats to her life. Morse is asked to act as her bodyguard, a job he plainly enjoys about as much as a dental appointment.

While he is watching over Pettybon, a local brickie named Barry Finch is found dead in the garage of a public house, initial reports pointing to strangulation. One of Pettybon's closest allies, Reverend Mervyn Golightly, is poisoned shortly after her television appearance, and suspicion settles on The Wildwood, the pop group whose record Pettybon has tried to have banned from the airwaves. When one of the band's founding members vanishes during a writing session, Morse and Thursday are out into the cold Oxford night, and they find him in the throes of a bad trip from a serious dose of LSD.

Further tests on Finch's body turn up traces of the drug as well, and Morse finds himself on the trail of a possible triple murderer, with the battle between liberalising forces and deep reactionary conservatism raging all around him.

Russell Lewis wrote it, Michael Lennox directed. Sylvestra Le Touzel is Mrs Joy Pettybon, Paul Bown is Rev Mervyn Golightly, Sharlette Henry is Mimi, Phil Rowson is Steve Carter, Sophie Simnett is Pippa Leyton, Ella Hunt is Emma Carr, Michael Fox is Ken Wilding, Jonathan Barnwell is Christopher Clark, Dario Coates is Lee 'Stix' Noble, and Will Payne is Nick Wilding.

The Wildwood and their clean-image manager are nicely drawn, and the clash between Pettybon's crusade and the permissive society around it gives the episode its snap. It is a story about who gets to decide what Britain watches and hears, with a body count attached.

It is social history with a body count, and it earns its layers.