The Godfather: Peter Corris on Lewis without Morse
Like millions of others, I was a great fan of the English television series Inspector Morse, which ran for 13 years. Set in Oxford and based on the novels and stories of Colin Dexter, the series starred John Thaw as the cantankerous, classical-music-loving cryptic crossword addict and beer connoisseur Morse, and Kevin Whatley as Sergeant Robert Lewis.
Along with gothic architecture and whodunit story lines, the chemistry between Morse and Lewis, the classic ‘knight and squire’ pairing as crime writer Barry Maitland termed them, provided the human interest that was characteristic of the series. Often condescending to Lewis’s basic education, provincialism and common man interests and pursuits, Morse could be rude to the point of offensiveness but also capable of deep appreciation of Lewis’s dogged quality and occasional flashes of insight.
The last episode of Inspector Morse was shown in 2000 and had the inspector dying, his death being announced by Lewis, who planted a kiss on Morse’s forehead. Millions mourned.
When my friend Michael Wilding told me that the spinoff series, entitled simply Lewis, of which I’d vaguely heard, featuring Whatley as a fully fledged inspector with his own sidekick, DS Hathaway, was enjoyable, I was sceptical. For one thing I remembered Spenser for Hire and A Man called Hawk.
Robert B Parker’s bestselling books about Boston PI Spenser inspired a television series starring Robert Urich as Spenser and the stylishly named Avery Brooks as Hawk, his semi-criminal African-American collaborator. When the series finished, an attempt to establish Brooks in his own spinoff failed. The interplay between the two had been vital and without it there was no zip. I feared the same for Whatley’s Lewis.
Browsing among the DVDs in the Newtown Public Library I came across a set of discs for series seven of Lewis. That pulled me up short. A Man called Hawk had lasted only one season. Given the swiftness with which non-rating television shows are dropped, a history of seven series had to signify success.
DVDs borrowed from libraries are notorious for being damaged and for freezing just when the story gets interesting, but this one played straight through and Wilding was right. Oxford never looked better, the script was excellent and Lewis had matured into a seasoned investigator with a capacity for appropriate remarks like ‘Never underestimate a battler’.
The interaction between Everyman, atheistical Lewis and better educated (Cambridge), spiritually troubled Hathaway plays well, something like a reversal of the Morse/Lewis relationship but not slavishly so.
Lewis has a sometimes testy relationship with his superior (interestingly, a woman) and, now a widower, a developing romance with the police pathologist. The library has only the one series and my local DVD outlet none at all so I’ll have to content myself with watching out for series eight which, as far as I know, has not been shown here yet.
Wilding, a distinguished Oxford graduate himself who keeps a close eye on these things, tells me that a prequel series about the younger Morse entitled Endeavour is also good. I’ll have to go looking for that.
Lewis Series 3 is now running on UKTV (Foxtel. Series 1 has just started on 7TWO. The first episode aired on January 29 and is still available online. It’s worth starting at the beginning.
I should have added that the star of Lewis is Kevin Whateley who has played the character over 27 years. Whateley reportedly said last year:”Detective shows are not my favourite. I almost certainly wouldn’t watch ‘Lewis’ if I wasn’t in it.”
I liked the first two or three series, but then the stories became incredibly far-fetched, and the characters became caricatures. Some scenarios were so bad that I didn’t care who killed whom or why.. Perhaps the actors playing Lewis & Hathaway felt the same way, because they then decided to skip one year. Series 7 was much better.
The Morse “prequel” called Endeavour didn’t meet my expectations, either. But there’s a new British ITV series called Grantchester which is much better, starring a young priest (who served in the Army!) and an older cop, with a sense of humour totally absent in Endeavour although it’s more or less set during the same time period, sometime in the fifties. James Runcie, the author of the books the series is based on and a bishop’s son, admitted that the character of the priest is actually based on his father!
Thanks to you both – I’ll follow these up.