The Mystery of Morse

On the evening of 6 January 1993, ITV performed a small piece of scheduling magic: it launched the seventh series of Inspector Morse with Deadly Slumber and, in the same night's schedule, showed a film about the making of the series it had just brought back. The Mystery of Morse, a fifty-minute documentary from Central Television directed by Ted Clisby, was a making-of in the classic mould — and, because nothing about Morse was ever quite ordinary, it doubled as a teasingly clever piece of promotion for the new run.

The film's business is the machinery of the phenomenon. Colin Dexter talks about creating the character and about watching John Thaw's brooding, precise interpretation take possession of it; producer Ted Childs describes how the two-hour format was built; the writers, among them Julian Mitchell, discuss the alchemy of turning novels into feature-length films. John Thaw and Kevin Whately are on hand, relaxed and funny, examining the partnership that made the series work, and James Grout contributes the gruff perspective of Chief Superintendent Strange. The choice of commentators is shrewd: John McVicar, the celebrated ex-convict turned writer, and John Stalker, the former senior policeman, offer outsider verdicts on why a nation that distrusted authority took a detective to its heart.

Its most enduring moment belongs to the composer, Barrington Pheloung, who reveals the series' most famous secret: the theme music sometimes carries the name of the killer in Morse code, spelled out in dots and dashes by the orchestra — or, on other occasions, the name of an innocent character as a deliberate red herring. The confession sent a generation of fans back to their videotapes, ears pressed to the speakers, trying to catch the score giving the game away. Pheloung's melody, itself built around the letters of the name Morse, had become one of the most recognisable signatures in British television history, and the documentary explains, with a glint, exactly how much of the show's quiet trickery had been hidden in plain sight.

The documentary also captures the series at a turning point. Made as the seventh series went into production, it shows a cast and crew aware that they were part of television history, though not yet sure how long the run would last. It was released on video as well as broadcast, under the fuller title The Mystery of Morse: The Making of Morse, and it remains the definitive record of how the dreaming spires acquired their most famous detective — a film about a show that had, in seven years, become something like a national institution, and that would go on, through the specials of the late nineties, to become something stranger still: a television series that refused to die on schedule.