The Dead of Jericho

Nothing about Inspector Morse announced itself as television history in the making when this pilot went out on a Tuesday evening in January 1987. It was simply a new British detective serial, adapted from a well-regarded series of novels by Colin Dexter and starring an actor better known for tough ITV roles. But The Dead of Jericho set the template for everything that followed: the dreaming spires and the cold canal water, the opera and the ale, the red Jaguar, and above all the partnership at the heart of the series.

The episode wastes no time establishing its melancholy hero. Chief Inspector Morse, denied the promotion he felt was owed to him and lumbered with a detective sergeant he did not ask for, is a man of solitude — a crossword, a pint, a private sorrow. Kevin Whately's Lewis, blunt, decent and quietly baffled by his new guv'nor, is the perfect foil, and their first case together already carries the affectionate friction that would sustain thirty-three films. The script came from Anthony Minghella, then a rising playwright, later the Oscar-winning director of The English Patient, and it has a literary confidence rare in television crime.

The case arrives wrapped in Morse's own past. Anne Staveley, whom he knew and quietly admired from their choral society, is discovered hanged at her home in Jericho, the canal-side quarter of north Oxford. The local CID, led by Norman Jones's Chief Inspector Bell, is content to file the death as a straightforward suicide. Morse, half from instinct and half from guilt, is not. Two clues carry the investigation: a parking ticket that fixes an impossible visit to the street on the night Anne died, and a copy of Sophocles' Oedipus the King — the play about a man who cannot see the truth until it has destroyed everything he loves.

Gemma Jones lends Anne a luminous, rueful presence in the scenes that conjure her, so that we understand exactly why Morse cannot let her death rest. Patrick Troughton, the second Doctor Who, gives a wonderfully crabby turn as George Jackson, the elderly neighbour whose quiet watchfulness of the street conceals a dangerous secret — and whose murder turns a personal tragedy into a murder investigation. James Laurenson is all charm and unease as Tony Richards, who with his brother Alan ran the firm where Anne had once worked, and Charlotte Mitchell's Mrs Staveley guards the family's secrets with stiff-backed pride. The unravelling begins with the truth Morse never wanted to face: Anne's death was suicide, driven, he comes to believe, by her discovery of the son she had given up for adoption years before. The murder is George Jackson's. He had taken her suicide note from the house and was using it to blackmail the Richards firm; Tony Richards killed him to silence the blackmail, and the case breaks open when Lewis's fingerprint checks expose the brothers' long-running identity-swap. Morse's final confrontation carries none of the triumphalism of lesser detectives; it is simply another name added to the list of lives his job has failed to save.

Directed by Alastair Reid, a Scottish filmmaker whose later work would include the acclaimed drug-trafficking serial Traffik, the pilot moves with a stately, melancholy rhythm. Oxford has rarely looked so beautiful, or so cold. It ends, as so many Morse stories would, with the hero alone with his music and his regrets — and with the dawning sense that British television had just found one of its great detectives.