Inspector Morse Rest in Peace

In the weeks after the final case, with the country still mourning its favourite detective, the farewell took a stranger shape. Inspector Morse Rest in Peace was released straight to video in November 2000 — five days after The Remorseful Day went out — a ninety-six-minute tribute assembled from the series' own archives, and it remains the closest thing the franchise ever made to an obituary for its leading man, compiled while he was still, in every sense, alive.

Its presenter is James Grout, and the conceit is perfect: Grout appears as Chief Superintendent Strange, the man who spent thirteen years disapproving of Morse from the next office along, now delivering the valediction. The character's grumbling, half-affectionate verdicts on his old subordinate — on the drinking, the opera, the insubordination, the uncanny knack of being right — give the compilation a spine that a simple clip show would have lacked. Around him the films' best moments unspool: the Jaguar, the crossword, the pints, the doomed romances, the long walks through Oxford's quads and towpaths.

Because the tribute draws on the full run, its guest list is effectively a roll-call of British acting of the era. The great guest stars of the series reappear in the footage — Elizabeth Hurley, Richard Briers and Simon Callow, plus Sir John Gielgud — each frozen in a moment of murder or suspicion, and their presence reminds the viewer how the show functioned as a repertory theatre for the nation's finest character actors. Directed by Jamie McCoan to a script by Geoff Lindsey, with Colin Dexter's characters as its raw material, the video offers no new mysteries and solves none; its only case is the career of Endeavour Morse himself, reconstructed as a biography from thirty-three films. Its chronology follows the character from his first encounter with Lewis in the Jericho pilot to the last, grey dawn of The Remorseful Day, and the clips are chosen with an evident fondness for the series' small pleasures as well as its grand set pieces.

It was a release for the home market rather than a broadcast, and it found its natural home on the DVD of The Remorseful Day, where it survives as a bonus disc — an epitaph tucked inside the coffin of the final episode. Time has given the title an unintended weight: John Thaw died in 2002, two years later, at the age of sixty, and the words rest in peace now read less like a joke about a fictional retirement and more like the inscription the series never quite got to deliver. As a farewell it is affectionate, funny and faintly strange — a wake conducted by the deceased's most reluctant admirer, which is, on reflection, exactly how Morse would have wanted it.