The Last Morse

On 15 November 2000, ITV did something no British broadcaster had quite dared before: it broadcast the final episode of its most popular detective drama and, on the same evening, a documentary saying goodbye to it. The Last Morse, a fifty-minute retrospective directed by Ian Stuttard, went out as The Remorseful Day was still settling into the nation's memory — a wake conducted while the corpse was warm. The film's business, as its title and framing make plain, is double: an assessment of what thirteen years of Morse had meant to British television, and a celebration of the run itself.

Its structure is the familiar architecture of the television retrospective: interviews, clips, and the testimony of the people who were there. John Thaw reflects on the character he had worn for a decade and a half; Kevin Whately remembers the partnership that defined both their careers; Colin Dexter, whose novels started everything, talks about watching his creation outgrow him; producer Ted Childs supplies the production history; and Barrington Pheloung explains, again with a smile, what the music is doing. Rebecca Eaton, the long-serving executive producer of Masterpiece Theatre, which brought Morse to American viewers, contributes the transatlantic perspective. Around them, a gallery of the series' guest stars — Frances Barber, Patricia Hodge, Joanna David among them — testifies to what it was like to spend two hours inside the show's world.

The clips chosen are the series' greatest hits: the first meeting of Morse and Lewis in The Dead of Jericho, the opera-house splendours of The Death of the Self, the final, terrible phone call of The Remorseful Day. What emerges is a portrait of a programme that understood its own appeal better than most — the melancholy at its centre, the pairing of a man who knew everything about crime and nothing about himself with a sergeant who knew exactly who he was.

The retrospective's timing was the point. Morse had concluded its run, and the documentary was, in part, an exercise in closure for an audience that had spent thirteen years in the character's company. As it happened, the closure did not take. Lewis returned in his own series from 2006, and Endeavour, exploring the young Morse's first cases, began in 2012; the franchise that The Last Morse buried has never quite stopped producing new stories. Watching it now, the film reads less like an ending than like an intermission — but as a farewell to the era of John Thaw's Morse, made by the people who knew him best, it remains affectionate, candid and, in its way, definitive. There is a particular pleasure in hearing the actors who passed through the series speak of it as both a job and a phenomenon, their affection undimmed by the years.