#also having now seen the first episode of inspector morse i LOVE all the references

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Shaun Evans as Endeavour Morse

ENDEAVOUR 1.0 Overture

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Endeavour: Saluting the Wit and Constancy of Dr Max DeBryn

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A rummage. A rootle. A grub about. A fillet. The hors d’oeuvres. Getting him unzipped… Coming from anybody else, the irreverence with which Endeavour’s Dr Max DeBryn describes performing post-mortems would suggest callousness. From DeBryn though, it’s just DeBryn – playful, teasingly provocative and clever. The man’s a master of words as well as the scalpel. He may delight in making his squeamish colleague Morse green around the gills with descriptions of corpses being “as ripe and runny as a rancid Roquefort”, but underneath the mischief sits unarguable decency. DeBryn’s language is light-hearted, but his heart – unlike those of the patients on his slab – is in good working order. 

That much is clear from brief earnest moments DeBryn lets escape his dry-witted façade. He often remarks with compassion on the thankful small mercies in his clients’ violent deaths. In Endeavour series four episode ‘Game’, he instructs the uniforms carrying away a murder victim, “Gently, if you would gentlemen, she’s been through quite enough.” In series six episode ‘Confection’, he’s gentle and kind when a distraught ACC Bright visits him at his club for medical advice on Mrs Bright’s cancer diagnosis. When a child is shot by a stray bullet in Series 5’s ‘Quartet’, DeBryn drops his coolness to do everything to save him – and succeeds. When Morse congratulates him, the praise is shrugged off with characteristic detachment: “Makes a change to work on a live patient, I suppose, but I wouldn’t want to make a habit of it.” 

Detachment, one feels, is the key to understanding Dr DeBryn’s offhand manner. Morse may see more than his fair share of murder victims in his line of work, but he has the privilege of looking away at some point. Not Dr Debryn. It’s his job to look more closely at things from which the rest of us would avert our eyes. As a Home Office pathologist, the constant parade of victims – men, women and children – across his surgical table would take too heavy an emotional toll without a distancing strategy. That surely explains DeBryn’s arch humour and lurid references to having someone’s “tripes in a tub”. 

DeBryn explains it best when he tells Morse in series five’s ‘Cartouche’ that’s he’s no fan of scary films, “Cruelty, torture and Kensington gore? For some of us, it’s horror season all year round.” When Morse compliments his charming country home in series six’s ‘Pylon’, DeBryn tells him, “Something has to be lovely, doesn’t it?” In DeBryn’s day job, loveliness is in short supply. Between his seed cake and tea roses, it’s comforting to think the character has built himself a refuge of sorts.

Loveliness may be absent from his work, but loneliness DeBryn seems well acquainted with in Endeavour. There’s a melancholy to James Bradshaw’s earlier incarnation of the character that’s less detectable in Peter Woodthorpe’s more cantankerous bon viveur in Inspector Morse. While both are exacting professionals who give not an inch to lesser men (“I couldn’t possibly say,” is Woodthorpe’s character’s catchphrase when asked to use guesswork instead of science. Like a fairy tale wizard, he demands to be asked the right question – a not unintelligent one – in the right format before he’ll deign to respond) more space is allowed for vulnerability in Bradshaw’s performance. There’s more space in general, with Bradshaw appearing across the prequel’s 33 films, instead of only the seven appearances Woodthorpe made in Inspector Morse before ill health forced his retirement.  

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That’s one joy of a prequel like Endeavour, to push deeper under the skin of characters we know and love, to peel it back and probe the wounds beneath. Actor James Bradshaw, writer Russell Lewis, and Endeavour’s many directors have created a Max DeBryn whose curtness and dry wit masks a tugging sense of loss. When Morse asks DeBryn what he makes of love in series four’s ‘Game’, he bats the enquiry away before quoting the line, “And one was fond of me and all are slain.” Morse, recognising the work of his favourite poet A.E. Housman, completes the verse. “Ask me no more, for fear I should reply.” In that same episode, DeBryn remarks, “Love and fishing. Sooner or later it all comes down to the same thing: the one that got away.” There was once somebody fond of DeBryn, it’s hinted, but whether slain, or perhaps unable to love him at a time when not all love was legally accepted, they got away. 

Loneliness, or at least the pall of it cast over the prequel by our knowledge that Morse remains a bachelor, is one of many things shared by DeBryn and Endeavour. They’re fellow outsiders whose friendship is one of our greatest assurances of DeBryn’s decency. Amused as he is by Morse having no stomach for blood, DeBryn recognises a kinship there. Educated, cultured, with an appreciation of the finer things – food for gourmand DeBryn, opera for Morse, poetry and booze for them both – they’re out of place among the Jim Stranges of Thames Valley Police. (The lack of poetic soul in DS Strange puts him on the receiving end of DeBryn’s acid tongue more than once. When Strange remarks in series six’ ‘Confection’ that a victim “choked on his own puke”, DeBryn wryly comments, “Been at the Keats again, Sergeant?”)

Though DeBryn and Morse’s fondness for each other is more likely to express itself in gentle ribbing over a gin and Campari in Inspector Morse, there’s a smidge more tenderness and sincerity between them in Endeavour. It’s easy to feel that they care about each other, nowhere seen better than in DeBryn’s performing a bit of his finest broderie anglaise on Morse’s knifewound, or even in his explosive reaction to Morse and Thursday having a stand-up fight over the body of a young victim in series seven. Not only are DeBryn’s professional standards insulted by their behaviour, but he appears incensed by how destructive Morse is being. The same could be said for his series eight comment – about a victim but indirectly about Morse’s drink problem – that alcohol is a notorious depressant and “we rarely make wise choices when inebriated.” Dr DeBryn, no stranger to drink, must also be talking from personal experience. 

A sharp wit, a dapper dresser, a good man, and an elegant speaker with more inventive euphemisms for death than Monty Python’s Dead Parrot sketch, it’s no wonder Dr Max DeBryn has become a fan-favourite character in the world of Morse. He may not be one of the leads, but even in the briefest of scenes, he never fails to leave an impression. In Colin Dexter’s novels, but particularly as played by James Bradshaw and Peter Woodthorpe, he’s somebody we’d all stand a drink for at The White Horse. So here’s to you, Max. Should we say two o’ clock?

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Endeavour series 8 is available to stream now on ITV Hub and Britbox. 

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Endeavour Series 8 Episode 1 Review: the Inspector Morse Transition Begins

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Endeavour Series 8 Episode 1 Review: ‘Striker’

Warning: this Endeavour review contains spoilers.

It’s 1971, and Oxford’s finest are, as ever, dealing with all of humanity’s worst impulses. Endeavour Morse (Shaun Evans) wakes up late from a hangover, leaving DI Thursday (Roger Allam) waiting in vain for his usual morning lift to work from his Detective Sergeant. It’s not behaviour we’d expect from our Morse…except, of course, it is, when you think about it. 

John Thaw’s Inspector was a man who suffered silently, and it’s that version of the character that the sensitive, easily hurt young man we met back in Endeavour’s pilot episode nine years ago is growing into. It isn’t going to be fun to witness, but it’s what we signed up for. The shocking events of series seven’s finale, in which any last vestiges of Morse’s innocence were snuffed out forever, are never discussed directly, but they’re here, nonetheless. As Morse bitterly remarks to Joan Thursday late in this episode, that situation ended how it had to. A master manipulator took away somebody he’d grown to love, and a brief idyll ended in disaster. The worst of it is, we know that it won’t be the last time he’s hit by such despair. 

That acid note of disappointment has been present for a while in Morse’s behaviour, but it’s sourer than ever now. The two cases he’s confronted with in ‘Striker’ don’t do a great deal to improve his mood, either. At first glance, they don’t seem to have much in common. A bomb blast rings out through the quads of Morse’s alma mater, Linacre College. A young secretary, Margaret Widdowson, has opened a lethal package and is killed instantly. 

As pathologist Max DeBryn puts it with his usual quiet compassion, she wouldn’t have had time to register what was happening. As we approach the end for Endeavour, time to flag up how great James Bradshaw’s been as Max throughout. An entire life conjured effortlessly through gesture and tone: instantly believable as a younger version of the character played by Peter Woodthorpe in Inspector Morse’s early episodes.

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Similar plaudits are owed to Sean Rigby, who’s also faced the tough task of capturing a man already familiar to us from Morses past. The DS Strange we meet in ‘Striker’ is an altogether more dapper, organised man than we’ve seen him before; someone who, like Morse, is in search of a little more to fill his life than take-home murder cases and dinners for one. At least, that’s what we might deduce from the concerned look on his face as he opens his invitation to a Masonic function, for which a date is most definitely expected. 

It’s Joan Thursday, for whom Endeavour’s carried a torch for years, that Strange settles on as his potential plus one. She’s back home in Oxford again, working at a women’s refuge as part of her employment with Welfare. Joan’s flattered by the unexpected invitation, and – much to Strange’s evident surprise – she accepts. Would you believe me if I say that I called this particular development last year? Probably not, but it always seemed clear that something pretty serious had to happen to disrupt the budding friendship between Strange and his former housemate, given how fractious their relationship in Inspector Morse will turn out to be…

Morse is stuck with this episode’s other case: a phoned-in threat against the life of Oxford Wanderers’ star striker, Northern Irish international Jack Swift (Julian Moore-Cook). Football is entering its baroque phase in ‘71, with rising salaries and glamour girls galore. Morse, for whom sports, money and women are, shall we say, thorny subjects, isn’t exactly living his best life when he’s assigned to act as Swift’s bodyguard. In a world where players are given names like the ‘Doncaster Dynamo’ (your South-Yorkshire-born reviewer might have to pinch that one herself), the glory days of Keegan and Best are conjured, though they’re never referred to here. This episode is full of other old ghosts, however, and when the link between the two cases is revealed, we finally come to understand who really wants Jack Swift dead, and why. 

1971 was a year of great turmoil and loss in Northern Ireland, the consequences of which resonate to this day. That complex political situation was, I thought, handled less sensitively than it could have been in this episode, but viewers from NI deserve the last word on that subject. A shame, as this is otherwise a series with a keen eye for its period. This episode gives us Max Bygraves’ song hailing the virtues of the UK’s new decimal currency (yes, really) and an appropriately jaded take on the seedier side of ‘70s Britain: the land of Get Carter and The Good Life, as much a mass of fascinating contradictions as it is today. It remains to be seen where series eight will take Endeavour Morse, but, on this evidence, a rough road lies ahead. 

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Endeavour series 8 continues on Sunday the 19th of September at 8pm on ITV.

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