Endeavour - the seventh series, one episode in

(WARNING: Here be spoilers – perhaps it’s best you don’t read this until you’ve watched ‘Oracle’, the first episode of the seventh series of Endeavour which was broadcast on Sunday…)

I was greatly looking forward to the new (seventh) series of Endeavour, the Inspector Morse prequel which follows the early years of Colin Dexter’s great detective. Various interviews with people involved have stated that we are reaching the end of Endeavour’s run, although as an eighth series has already been commissioned by ITV it seems to be a case of not just yet. The original show ran for a total of 33 episodes, as did its sequel Lewis; the current series of Endeavour has just three episodes which will brings the prequel’s total up to 30, so I think we can safely assume that there will be a further three episodes next year and then that will be, as they say, that. Shame, but nothing lasts forever.

Fan of Morse that I am, I’ve always been pleased when younger versions of characters from the original series turned up in Endeavour (spotting them has been almost as much fun as spotting the many references to films and other British TV shows that have cropped in Endeavour from time to time). With not much left of Endeavour’s run, I wonder about a few seemingly prominent characters from Morse’s early life that have yet to appear. What of McNutt, mentioned as Morse’s mentor but in Endeavour seemingly reduced to a passing mention in favour of Fred Thursday, so wonderfully played by Roger Allam? What of Roland Marshall from the cricket episode? Or that curiously-named Machiavellian academic Clixby Bream? Most of all, what of Hugo de Vries, the con-man who was out to get Morse in one of the best episodes of the lot? 

(On a more superficial note, I was hoping that at some point we’d see Morse driving a Lancia as that was mentioned as his car of choice in the earlier novels before he got the trademark Jag, but I’ve resigned myself to the fact that that probably won’t happen!)

In the world of Endeavour, it’s now 1970 and the new series kicked off with Morse seeing in the new decade in style, off to Venice for a night at the opera and getting lucky with the sultry brunette in the next box; compare that to Fred and Win Thursday who dined on chicken-in-a-basket at the WMC back in Oxford. Venice! Quite how a sergeant in a provincial police force who’s just bought a house can afford such a high-end break is a mystery in itself although to be fair, the house is very much a fixer-upper.

Elsewhere, the new year bought another murder, that of a barmaid by a canal – Oxford, not Venice – while another barmaid was acting a bit strangely.

In the first episode, the parallels between Venice and Oxford were played up for all they were worth, what with the waterways of La Serenissima contrasting with the Oxford Canal and a lingering shot of the Hertford Bridge, that bridge in Oxford that’s known as the Bridge of Sighs even though the Venetian bridge it actually resembles is the Rialto. Given this and the fact that the unmurdered barmaid was displaying seemingly psychic abilities in an early Seventies setting, Don’t Look Now obviously came to mind. Perhaps ‘Canal’ would have been a better title than ‘Oracle’?

To be honest, I’m not quite sure where the show was going with the psychic angle – both barmaids, it turned out, were test subjects in a serious university research project into extra-sensory perception, although that aside here was a typically back-biting academic set-up (are there any other sorts in the world of Morse? Perhaps surprisingly, this one was not associated with Lonsdale College). This being 1970, there was a heady dose of outright sexism; the men (headed by a professor who wouldn’t let his wife sign the cheques) were resentful of the fact that their department’s token woman, Dr Benford, got the Open University-style TV job they’d all auditioned for. Alas, she did not make it to the end of the episode.

In one of the more predictable murder cases that have come Morse’s way, the sexist prof turned out to be the murderer of poor Dr Benford, although the motive was unrequited love rather than professional jealousy and the fact that she knew something about the canal murder (actually, she knew someone – the apparently psychic barmaid – who reckoned she knew something). The canal murder which had kicked off the episode remained to all intents and purposes unsolved by the end – the psychic storyline was left hanging along with talk of a flasher operating along the canal (how very Seventies) and hints from the redoubtable Dorothea Frazil about cruelty to cats (hope the Castle Gate CID chaps catch that perpetrator). Then, just before the closing credits, a person unknown did for the flasher; clearly, we have a story arc…

More interesting was the character development. Fred Thursday, more cynical and much greyer than before under the trilby, is clearly feeling the strain – with Morse away in Venice, his investigation into the barmaid’s murder was decidedly slipshod (fingering the boyfriend as the murderer in the face of a seemingly decent alibi). Then he went and bought a couple of canaries (a bit random, that) and snapped at Win for no good reason (speaking of Thursday’s domestic arrangements, things have clearly changed as Win no longer makes his sandwiches, and when Fred had a go he made a mess of it; a good bit of realism, that, for many is the occasion when I’ve not done a good job of that task when the butter’s been too cold). Perhaps the events of the previous series, when he went a bit Gene Hunt by taking a bribe and beating up a suspect, have long-term consequences here (although, of course, he did give the money back). Anton Lesser got to do some pathos as Chief Superintendent Bright, nursing his dying wife (diagnosed with lung cancer in the previous series – what with all that smoking, I guess someone had to get that, just like Betty did in Mad Men) and worrying about his lack of faith in contrast the faith healers who’ve come round to pray with her.

Jim Strange, Morse’s future boss, has meanwhile reverted to type; having spent much of the previous series uncharacteristically pursuing the unofficial investigation into the murder of DC Fancy, he’s now back in careerist mode, berating Morse for taking crime scene photos home with him (his further criticism of Morse for highlighting Thursday’s rather slipshod investigation methods with regards to the initial canal towpath murder may have be a bit wide of the mark, but that’s in keeping with Strange as a bureaucratic yes-man).

And Morse? First of all, thank God he’s ditched the ’tache; that just didn’t sit well, last series. Aside from decorating his new house and doing typically Morse things like solving the crossword and rubbing colleagues up the wrong way while being three steps ahead of everyone else when it comes to figuring out who’s been doing the murders, he started the episode with blood on his shirt. Whose blood? At the end of the episode, we viewers are none the wiser but no doubt there are a few ideas as to what this all means. Perhaps not unrelated to this, Morse seemingly has a new friend. After getting pick-pocketed at an open-air concert (dangerous places, those Oxford colleges) he met Ludo, who introduced himself as an old pal from their university days before wining and dining the detective.

The kicker at the end, which is clearly something that’s going to run for this short series at least, was the revelation that Ludo’s wife is Violetta, Morse’s Venetian love interest, but my mind was on something else. Racing away and jumping to a couple of conclusions, possibly in the style of Morse himself (albeit without the help of a couple of pints). The blood on the shirt – does that concern this love-triangle? And this Ludo feller  – a highly cultured man with an ingratiating style and a taste for fine wine. Could he, I wonder, be Hugo de Vries?

I may be wrong, of course (even Morse got it wrong, sometimes – that’s one of the great things about him as a fictional detective, the fact that he was allowed to do so). But, one episode in, I don’t think I am…

Mastermind

The music, the chair. The lights shining on me. And John Humphrys sitting yards away, asking me for my name, occupation and specialist subject. What was I thinking?

I’d wanted to go on Mastermind for years, had applied several times in fact but never got past the qualifying interview where every applicant gets asked the same set of random general knowledge questions to which the answers are never revealed. But, in 2018, I was successful.

They asked me what I would like my specialist subjects to be (you must have three, assuming progression to the final). The rule here is that your subject must have had at least two books published about it that are either in print or easily available second-hand (on this basis, Watford Football Club was ineligible; insert your own joke here). The reason for this is that the people at the BBC who set the questions need to know where to get the information and they can’t just use Wikipedia, it has to be from a source that has been published. I chose John Buchan, Samuel Johnson and – should I make it to the final – the Flashman novels.

Why these? Well, I’ve volunteered at Dr Johnson’s House in the City and I love the Flashman books. John Buchan, meanwhile, is one of my favourite novelists – I first encountered him at school when we had The Thirty-Nine Steps as a class reader in second-year (nowadays Year Eight) English. I don’t recall spending much time on it in class, not that that mattered as I devoured it over a weekend, and then went looking for more books by ‘JB’ (as he was widely known) in the school library. There were quite a few…

Not long after talking specialist subjects, I got the call to say I’d made it onto the show. An email followed shortly with a date and time at which I would be expected to report to the BBC studio at Media City.

And so to Salford. I had to take at least one change of clothes, in case I clashed with another contestant! I went for smart, with a tie and – inspired by Gareth Southgate, for it was that World Cup summer – a waistcoat. None of my rivals went for ties, so I had won on ‘best-dressed contestant’; in fact one of the others had to get changed because of a prominent logo (despite instructions – well, it is a BBC show). Another had previously been on Pointless (which I had once seen as part of the studio audience; another story for another time) but hadn’t won anything.

Here’s what happened: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DzzDUMFWnPE&list=PL5riq3KQovvwZwuXgehOfZgX1p0GW0-mW

In a change from the show’s usual format, we went into the studio individually for our specialist rounds and didn’t see how the others did. Then it was back into the studio for general knowledge and only then would we learn how the others had done.

Could I beat three others who’d got to this stage? Unsure, I concentrated on my own expectations. A final score of over twenty would, I felt, be a good showing – whereas under ten would be disgraceful.

The specialist subject round passed in a blur. I remember bright lights as John Humphrys asked the first question; I knew the answer before he’d finished but the rules say you can’t interrupt. At the end, 14 points, no passes and one rather long-winded (but correct) answer. A smile and applause at the end, then I walked off into the company of a runner who kept me apart from the others.

Back in the studio, I wasn’t really surprised when John Humphrys called up one of the others as the lowest-scoring contestant but when he wouldn’t say his score I was surprised. Then, as the poor bloke did very poorly on general knowledge, I remembered that he had said that he was a secondary school teacher and I thought I would not like to be him when this got broadcast. He ended with just seven points. As the highest scorer in the specialist knowledge round, I was the last contestant to be called up, although by then I knew I only needed four points to win.

Was I confident? You bet; my penchant for general knowledge was one of the reasons I’d wanted to go on Mastermind in the first place! But there was this nagging doubt … which didn’t really feature for the next couple of minutes. A couple of slip-ups – since when did I know much about the Brit Awards? – but in the end, a comfortable win, 26 points in total. I was very pleased with myself. Next stop, the semi-finals!

Back in Salford a couple of months later, the atmosphere was very different and not just because there were five contestants, not four (meaning less time for questions). My fellow semi-finalists were all regular quizzers who all seemed to know each other; some had been on Mastermind before and were on first name terms with BBC staff! Most were also several years older (and wiser? we would soon find out!) than me.

Here’s what happened: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wt2UD3DY9po

Afterwards, we had to wait several months until the show was broadcast (there are 24 first-round episodes of Mastermind, broadcast one every week, followed by five semi-finals and then the final itself). To be honest, I got fed up with getting asked when ‘my’ episodes would be on – here was a question for which the only answer could be ‘pass’!

It was only when it was broadcast (first round in February 2019, semi-final in April) that certain memories came back.

Not giving me a point for the question about Argentinian cowboys was a bit harsh! Still, at least I did not come last.

The best bit about my semi-final appearance, though, was never going to be broadcast. As I sat in the chair after my general knowledge round, it was announced that they needed to change a camera angle (or something like that) and I would need to stay seated as John Humphrys hadn’t told me my score yet! So, there I was in the Mastermind chair, with John Humphrys staring across at me with no questions. None that were scripted, anyway. What followed next is why I know that John Humphrys, he of the Today programme on Radio Four, is a great interviewer. It started with “so, you say you're a tour guide” and within three questions, we were talking about his native Wales (where, admittedly, I have done tours) with him waxing lyrical about Aberaeron (a town some 25 miles south of Aberystwyth where, I later learned, he has a house). I can personally attest that telling a Welshman that your favourite place in Wales is Tenby (a.k.a. ‘Little England Beyond Wales’) is not a smart move. What can I say? Golden beaches, a couple of nice pubs – not that John Humphrys gave me a chance to back up what I had said, of course. He just said that that was the wrong answer!

Specialising in John Buchan for the first round has had an unusual outcome. My performance was noticed by Ursula Buchan, a grand-daughter of JB and author of a recent a biography, Beyond the Thirty-Nine Steps (too late for me to claim it as a book I used for revision; there are two previous biographies, one written in the Sixties and the other in the Nineties). Some time after my first-round episode, the book launch took place and, having written a biography of a former Governor-General of Canada (as Lord Tweedsmuir, JB held this position from 1935 until his death in 1940), Ursula sent out an invitation to the Canadian High Commission. The High Commissioner was unavailable so the invite got passed onto the trade division … where Allison (my wife) happens to work!

Allison told Ursula of her own interesting JB connection – to which Ursula replied that we would both be very welcome, although this was a coincidence that JB himself wouldn’t have dared use in his novels! We were made to feel very welcome at the launch at Daunt Books in Marylebone, an event in which I found myself in the unusual situation of being in the presence of dozens of descendants of a man who I’d answered questions about on national television. I bought the book, of course, and Ursula was good enough to sign it for “a much admired Mastermind supremo!”.

Would I do it again? Did the dream live up to the reality? Perhaps these are specialist questions saved for a future episode!

King Arthur on the telly

King Arthur, it seems, can still grab people’s attention. The mythical Once and Future King of the Britons has cropped up twice on the telly recently – first with someone coming up with a theory (or rather, another theory) about where Camelot may have been located, and then in the title of a documentary that, as it turned out, wasn’t really about him.

The latest Camelot theory came from the TV presenter Nick Knowles who, while plugging a special edition of his show DIY SOS on The One Show last month, decided to go a bit off-message and state that he, or rather he and a professor from Bristol University, has (have?) a new theory about the location of Arthur’s court. Cirencester, apparently, is where the Arthur and his knights met around a round table that was in fact the old Roman amphitheatre there. In Roman times, the Gloucestershire market town was Corinium, a fort built at the point where the Fosse Way crosses the River Churn which became one of the biggest cities in Roman Britain. 

Archaeological evidence has shown that in the period after the Romans left the amphitheatre was fortified but it takes quite a leap of the imagination to go from there to claiming that this little corner of the Cotswolds was once Camelot – a place that’s also been claimed to have been identified as having been in Cornwall, Hampshire, Somerset or even Yorkshire, and that’s before you take into account the various possible Welsh locations that have been suggested over the years.

I’m not convinced by this new claim. If you’re going to go around stating that the round table part of the King Arthur legend is based on the notion that a Dark Ages warrior leader might have met with his followers in an amphitheatre (which makes sense), then the one at the old Roman legionary fortress at Caerleon over in south-eastern Wales is a much better bet.

Next up was a BBC2 documentary called King Arthur’s Britain: The Truth Unearthed which was broadcast a couple of weeks ago. Fronted by Alice Roberts – a presenter with much more credibility than Mr Knowles, she being an academic (the Professor of Public Engagement in Science at Birmingham University, no less) with shows like Time Team and Coast on her CV – this focussed on a place that has long been associated with Arthur; in fact, according to the legends it’s where his life began. Tintagel, on Cornwall’s north coast.

What followed wasn’t really about Arthur – somewhat unsurprisingly, the story (as told by the medieval chronicler/historian Geoffrey of Monmouth, whose rather fanciful writings provide us with the basis of the King Arthur legends as we know them today) of his having been conceived on a stormy night at Tintagel during which his dad made use of Merlin’s magic to trick his mum into thinking that he was actually her husband was quickly dismissed as legend rather than fact (but then, one of the key things to remember is that much of the Arthur story is more legend than fact; in fact, when touching on anything relating to King Arthur it is worth remembering that line from The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance – “when the legend becomes fact, print the legend”). There were also some rather cheap-looking animated graphics but I think those can safely be disregarded as unimportant.

There were two main strands – an archaeological dig at Tintagel itself (long known to have been a high-status settlement in the Dark Ages, the focus being on the rocky peninsular known as Tintagel Island, upon which the medieval castle was later built; historically, this was always regarded as being distinct from the village on the mainland which was called Trevena until the mid-nineteenth century) and a wider look at archaeological studies across the country in order to find evidence for the Anglo-Saxon invasion during the post-Roman period which provided the backdrop for the legends of Arthur which originate in the Celtic/British resistance to this new influx. Although he wasn’t mentioned in the earliest records of the time (not that there are many of those), it is Arthur who over time emerged in the stories about an heroic leader who led the fight against the invaders. 

Professor Roberts concluded that the available archaeological evidence doesn’t really support the idea of a large-scale invasion, contrary to what the chroniclers (not just Geoffrey of Monmouth but also the monk Gildas, who was writing in the sixth century) tell us; a very detailed study in Yorkshire has revealed evidence for settlement rather than conquest, while a scan of an Anglo-Saxon cross found in a grave in Cambridgeshire and DNA analysis of human remains points more to co-existence and assimilation than conflict. That said, there does seem to have been a clear cultural divide between eastern Britain (which was being settled by the Anglo-Saxons and so was linked primarily with Northern Europe) and the west. The dig at Tintagel unearthed a lot of high-end pottery which hinted at trading links with the Mediterranean world having been maintained after the Romans had left (the most obvious commodity that the Cornish of the Dark Ages had to trade with was quickly and correctly identified as tin). Then there was an inscribed piece of stone which seemed to indicate that the people who lived there were probably Christians. By placing King Arthur’s conception at Tintagel, maybe Geoffrey of Monmouth was alluding to the importance of that place in the Dark Ages?

All very interesting, fascinating in part. Yet I couldn’t help but think I’ve heard a lot of this before. It took me a couple of minutes to figure out where – a TV academic of an older vintage called Michael Wood, who covered King Arthur in In Search of the Dark Ages and in a couple of chapters of a later book called In Search of England. In the former, a TV series which aired between 1978 and 1980 and can now be found on YouTube, he too sought the facts behind the Arthurian legends by looking at how archaeologists were trying to piece together what happened in Britain after the Romans left (during the course of which he visited the amphitheatre at Cirencester) and found evidence hinting at continuity rather than conquest in Dark Ages Britain before going off to look at hill-forts in rural Southern England and concluding by casting doubt on whether King Arthur really existed. In the latter, he referred to a stone with an inscription on it being unearthed at a 1998 archaeological dig at Tintagel, which at the time generated quite a bit of excitement due to the name on it, Artognou, being not a million miles from ‘Arthur’ although it’s a bit of a stretch of the imagination to link the stone with the Once and Future King! 

Interesting things in Wiltshire pubs (part 2)

Time to continue our tour of Wiltshire pubs that contain interesting things. From Avebury, let us journey further west (just under 15 miles by road) to Lacock. This village (or is it a town? It was given a market charter in the Middle Ages, which would technically make it a town even though there’s no longer a market) has remained unchanged for many years, with most of the buildings dating back to at least the eighteenth century. Lacock’s remarkably unspoiled appearance has made it a favourite with the makers of TV costume dramas, and it has appeared in plenty of those – Cranford, two versions of Pride and Prejudice, Moll Flanders and Tess of the d’Urbervilles (to name but a few) were filmed here, while the stately home, Lacock Abbey (“the birthplace of photography”, for that was where William Henry Fox-Talbot took the first photograph, in 1835), was Wolf Hall in Wolf Hall as well as being used as part of Hogwarts School in the Harry Potter films.

Lacock, which is almost entirely owned by the National Trust, has several pubs, including another Red Lion, but the one we’re interested in here is the George. As a pub name, the George also has more than one origin – either from St George or King George. The former has been recognised as the patron saint of England since the fourteenth century, although veneration of him in England goes back further. As for kings, there have been six of those but crucially that was the name of every King of Great Britain between 1714 and 1830 (starting with George I and ending with George IV), which is why the eighteenth century is sometimes known in this country as the Georgian period.

Inside the George in Lacock, we have our second unusual or interesting thing. In one of the rooms, there’s an old fire-place and in front of that is displayed an old spit or roasting-jack, as used for turning big joints of meat in front of open fires in the days before ovens. What is unusual about this one is that it was dog-operated, for it is linked by way of a pulley system to a large wheel in which a small dog was placed – the dog would run in the wheel, and that would in turn power the spit.

While such an arrangement seems odd at first, when you think about it it seems hardly surprising that people would have thought to get an animal to power the roasting-jack, for (as far as humans were concerned) being a ‘spit-boy’ was a low-paid, monotonous and – thanks to being up close to a roaring fire for long periods of time – uncomfortable job (see Tony Robinson’s TV series The Worst Jobs in History for more on this). Getting a dog to do it instead seems to have been a widespread practice by the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries – widespread enough for there to have been a particular breed of dog, long of body and short of leg, that was called the turnspit. Also known as the kitchen dog or the cooking dog, the breed does not seem to have been particularly well-documented, and it was more or less extinct by the mid-to-late nineteenth century, by which time automated roasting-jacks, powered by steam or by the hot air rising from the fire, were fairly widespread.

Recent reads - four second-hand novels

A fascinating quartet of second-hand novels has been receiving my attention recently…

The Path of the King by John Buchan

Fan of John Buchan though I am, I sometimes come across works of his that I have not previously encountered; he did, after all, write a lot of books and not all of them are still in print. This one, The Path of the King (first published in 1921), comes in the form of a smart-looking red hardback which was published by Thomas Nelson (an Edinburgh publisher, which as well as publishing Buchan’s books employed him as a director; the Thomas Arthur Nelson to whom The Thirty-Nine Steps was dedicated was a descendant of the company’s founder in addition to being a friend of Buchan’s). Later described by Buchan himself (in his autobiography Memory Hold-the-Door) as “my first serious piece of fiction”, it is an interesting tale of how greatness in people can be transmitted down the family tree; sometimes, it  lies dormant for generations before re-igniting at the right time. The story begins with a prologue set some time after the American Civil War, in which three men around a remote campfire theorise on how the “spark” of “masterful men” can be found in the most unlikely places: “The things we call aristocracies and reigning houses are the last places to look for masterful men … who is more likely to inherit the fire – the eldest son with his flesh-pots or the younger son with his fortune to find? … The spark once transmitted may smoulder for generations under ashes, but the appointed time will come, and it will flare up to warm the world. God never allows waste. And we fools rub our eyes and wonder when we see genius come out of the gutter. It didn’t begin there.” I guess we modern folk would say it was all about genetics. This story begins with Biorn, a Viking prince, before jumping down a few generations to Jehan, a Norman knight – and so on. Rather like Buchan’s Sir Walter Raleigh, The Path of the King is less a coherent novel than a collection of short stories held together by a unifying thread or theme, which in this case is what happens to Biorn’s descendants down the centuries – men and women, some of them noble, some of them very ignoble indeed, all united by blood and by their possession of a family heirloom in the form of a gold ring, made from the amulet Biorn received from his father and which I suppose acts as the physical manifestation of the “spark”. They get caught up in events like the Norman Conquest, the St Bartholomew’s Day massacre and the Popish Plot, and they encounter real people like Joan of Arc, Sir Walter Raleigh, Oliver Cromwell and Daniel Boone. Eventually, the “spark” resurfaces in nineteenth-century America, in the form of Abraham Lincoln who is descended from Biorn on his mother’s side. He loses the gold ring, but it is no longer needed as it is he in whom the long-dormant “spark” will reignite – something his dying mother recognises. The epilogue has three men witness Lincoln’s funeral parade following his assassination; one of them (an American professor) remarks that “there goes the first American”, to which another (a British diplomat) replies: “I dare say you are right, Professor. But I think it is also the last of the Kings.” As novels go, this is very much one for those who are interested in history, and it reflects Buchan’s fascination with the New World and its ancestral links with the Old – particularly in his treatment of Lincoln and the admiration expressed for him by the British character at the end, which can be looked at in the context of people like Buchan looking to promote a spirit of cohesion between English-speaking peoples on both sides of the Atlantic. Reading this as an historical novel, it has to be noted that the the fact that so many real people and events over different centuries can be successfully woven into the plot in a way that it doesn’t feel like they’ve been crow-barred into it is testimony to Buchan’s great skill as an author.

The Courageous Exploits of Doctor Syn by Russell Thorndike

Having recently touched on this particular character when looking into smuggling on Romney Marsh, I was delighted to find a couple of old Doctor Syn paperbacks in a charity shop recently; the adventures of this most extraordinary of fictional clergymen, written by Russell Thorndike, ran to seven in total and have long been out of print. They make no claim to be great literature but as adventure stories they are most definitely up there with the exploits of (say) the Scarlet Pimpernel, Horatio Hornblower and Richard Sharpe. Published in 1939, Courageous Exploits was the fifth Doctor Syn book to be written, but if the novels are to be read in sequence it’s the fourth. By this stage in the series, the Reverend Doctor Syn is well established at Dymchurch as the much-loved local vicar and, under the identity of the ‘Scarecrow’, the ruthless leader of the Night Riders, the local smuggler gang (the secret of his identity is known only to a select few). Exasperated by the Night Riders’ continued success, the Admiralty has sent the ruthless Captain Blain down to Romney Marsh to defeat them and bring the Scarecrow to justice; his men are to be billeted in a local barn, while the captain himself moves into the vicarage! There follows a series of cat-and-mouse adventures, which could stand alone as short stories as well as parts of a coherent whole, as Blain tries to do his duty while Syn, or rather his alter ego the Scarecrow, rises to the challenge by growing ever bolder. A real historical person, the Prince of Wales (the future George IV), makes an appearance – as he does, funnily enough, in the adventures of the other three fictional heroes I have mentioned above. As is the case with “that demmed, elusive Pimpernel”, in Courageous Exploits HRH manages to encounter both Doctor Syn and the Scarecrow and respect the pair of them while at the same time remaining blissfully ignorant of the fact that they are the same person. This is good, old-fashioned adventure; a modern version would doubtless dwell more on the duality of Syn himself, the upstanding community leader who is also its most notorious criminal, and there would doubtless be a lot of trying to impose the values of the present onto late-eighteenth-century England which would mean that it would not be anywhere near as much fun to read. The Doctor Syn books may be out of print, but they are still worth looking into.

The Inimitable Jeeves by P.G. Wodehouse

As was the case with John Buchan, I first discovered P.G. Wodehouse when I was in my early teens, at first because of the superb Jeeves and Wooster TV series with Melchett and George from Blackadder – sorry, Stephen Fry and Hugh Laurie – in the title roles. They were brilliant in that, by the way, and it was but a short step from watching Jeeves and Wooster to discovering the books on which the series was based, of which the school library had a plentiful supply. Oddly, though, I never really progressed much beyond the Jeeves stories – the other Wodehouse creations, like Psmith and the Blandings crowd, didn’t really hold much appeal and while I have tried over the years to expand my horizons in the world of Wodehouse I always find myself coming back to the Jeeves stories. Maybe it’s because they are told in the first person, with that upper-class twit par excellence Bertie Wooster as the narrator, he being not so much an unreliable narrator but one who is not in full grasp of everything that’s going on. Luckily, though, he has Jeeves, the incredibly clever manservant who is able to extract his master, and at times his master’s friends, from the most unlikely and desperate of scenarios, allowing them to continue to amuse themselves, and us readers, at the Drones Club and various country houses. There are a lot of things going on in The Inimitable Jeeves, what with Bertie’s chum Bingo Little falling in love with every woman he meets, his rather scary Aunt Agatha trying to get Bertie married off at every conceivable opportunity, the mental-health specialist Sir Roderick Glossop (who, naturally, thinks Bertie’s off his rocker) putting in the odd appearance and his cousins Claude and Eustace (“the curse of the human race”) getting up to all sorts of shenanigans. Unlike some of the Jeeves books, The Inimitable Jeeves is actually not so much a novel as a collection of short stories (they first appeared in The Strand Magazine before coming out in book form in 1923), although some of them do follow on from one another. Some showcase Wodehouse at his best, with the humour deriving from the most unlikely sources. For example, ‘The Great Sermon Handicap’ is all about a group of young men, led by Claude and Eustace, placing bets on which of the local vicars in a corner of rural Gloucestershire will preach the longest sermon on a particular Sunday; naturally, Bertie and Jeeves get drawn into the mayhem that ensues. More of the same can be encountered in ‘The Purity of the Turf’ which involves bets being placed on, and attempts being made to rig, the races in a rural parish’s sports day (Mothers’ Sack Race, Choir Boys’ Hundred Yard Handicap, etc). There are some great set-pieces too, like the time Bertie has Sir Roderick for lunch on the same day that Claude and Eustace hide three cats and the top hat that they have stolen from Sir Roderick in Bertie’s flat, Bingo pretending to be a communist and Bertie actually getting one over on Aunt Agatha when the woman she’s been trying to set him up with turns out to be a jewel-thief. Finally, Bertie’s ongoing claim to be an author of romantic fiction under the pen-name of Rosie M. Banks (originally done in order for him to impress Bingo’s uncle so that he can persuade him to increase the ever cash-strapped Bingo’s allowance) gets exposed as a sham when it emerges that the woman whom Bingo has just married is not a waitress as he had supposed but none other than Rosie M. Banks herself. Only Jeeves can sort out this unholy mess. Hilarious.

Who Pays the Ferryman? by Michael J. Bird

The TV series of this name was before my time, but I’d vaguely heard about it from somewhere – it is set in the mid-to-late Seventies and concerns Alan Haldane, a middle-aged Englishman returning to Crete, the island where as a young man he spent part of the Second World War fighting in the mountains with the andartes of the Greek Resistance. He wants to try and reconnect with his wartime lover, but soon finds out that she is dead although she did bear him a daughter who is unaware of her true parentage. While many see ‘Leandros’ (Haldane’s nom de guerre among the andartes) as a returning hero there are a few who wish him ill because of what happened during the war. Seeing this in a charity shop, I was interested as I have previously read and enjoyed books about occupation and resistance during the War, both fictional (Captain Corelli’s Mandolin, The Guns of Navarone, etc) and factual (Ill Met by Moonlight, and for what it’s worth the real-life Kriepe kidnapping gets referred to in Who Pays the Ferryman?, the implication being that the fictional Haldane was somehow involved in this operation along with Billy Moss and Paddy Leigh Fermor). The novel version of Who Pays the Ferryman? is based on the TV series, not the other way round (Bird, whose TV dramas were usually set in the Mediterranean, wrote both). It is pretty good, although there are some annoying typos which might indicate that publication was a somewhat rushed job, the TV series having been very popular in its day (1977). As for the plot itself, a slow-burner of a relationship between Haldane and Annika, the sister of his old love (she being unaware that Haldane is her niece’s biological father, and he being reluctant to commit to her for that very reason) plays out alongside sub-plots like an Australian visitor trying to lay the past (in the form of his late Cretan grandfather) to rest, the sudden appearance of Haldane’s (English) ex and Haldane’s restoration of an old caique (sailing-boat), while in the background a vendetta against Haldane establishes itself. The characters are well-rounded and very believable. It’s a good story which shows us that war casts shadows which continue to fall long after the guns have stopped, and that while actions always have consequences, it can sometimes take decades for the consequences to make themselves known. I liked this book enough to find some episodes of the TV series on YouTube, and very good it is too.

The Last Kingdom (the second series, three episodes in)

“I am Uhtred, son of Uthred…”

So begins each episode of The Last Kingdom, the BBC’s adaptation of Bernard Cornwell’s ‘Saxon’ novels which has deservedly returned for a second series. In this, the real-life struggle of Alfred the Great’s Wessex (the kingdom of the title, it being the only one of the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms that hasn’t fallen to the marauding invaders from Scandinavia) is intertwined with the adventures of the fictional Uhtred, a warrior whose life’s ambition – to retake the northern coastal stronghold of Bebbanburg which is his by right but his villainous uncle’s by possession – is frequently put on hold so that he can either fight for Alfred or chase after women. He’s the one saying that he’s Uhtred, son of Uhtred, of course – although I cannot for the life of me figure out what accent he’s saying it in (the actor who plays him, Alexander Dreymon, was born in Germany and has appeared on stage in Paris and London but knowing that doesn’t leave me any the wiser; but hey, at least he’s well-spoken).

In a world of sharply-defined loyalties – for late ninth-century Britain, it’s generally Christian Anglo-Saxons versus pagan Vikings – Uhtred is a curious mixture of the lot; a Saxon raised by Vikings and a pagan who, as he reminds us at some point, has been baptised not once but twice. His enemies fear him, while his allies are somewhat wary of him as they can never be entirely sure of his loyalty. His weakness (or, if we’re using a fictional warrior analogy, his Achilles heel) is women; were he to put them from his mind, or at least stop trying to sleep with every other one that he encounters, he would probably be warming himself in front of the fire with a flagon of ale in his hand following a slap-up feast for himself and his motley band of followers in Bebbanburg’s great hall by now.

At the end of the first series, having helped Alfred secure his great victory at Ethandun, Uhtred rode north to retake Bebbanburg. However, we weren’t that long into the first episode of the new series when he’d been easily distracted from this ambition that he keeps going on about, not even making it half-way through Mercia before a woman with whom he had shared a one-night stand tried to make off with his money and his sword, only to be thwarted by Hild, the nun-who-wants-to-be-a-warrior (her reward was to have Uhtred try to look at her while she was washing herself in a river). As Father Beocca wisely noted, Uhtred would probably fancy a goat if someone put it in a skirt.

Back down south, Alfred was busy thinking of the future – for it is he who is laying the foundations of what will become England. His latest plan is for an alliance with Mercia (the kingdom to the north of Wessex) by way of marrying off his daughter, Aethelflaed, to a Mercian noblemen. Watch out for her; the Lady of the Mercians, as she is known to history (although she has tended to get airbrushed out of some accounts of the creation of England), is going to matter a big deal as this series progresses.

Next up for Uhtred, however, was a madcap scheme to turn Guthred the slave into a king, which was actually going rather well until Uhtred slept with Guthred’s sister Gisela; for this, he was sold into slavery and ended up on the rowing-deck of a galley bound for Iceland. He was released thanks to his foster-brother Ragnar (son of Ragnar) and Hild, the latter of whom had to remind him that he was indeed Uhtred, son of Uhtred (since some people had started referring to him as Osbert, which was his original name, perhaps he needed reassuring). Our hero then managed to make a rod for his own back by killing the evil Abbot Eadred – over Gisela, of course – which ultimately gave him no option but to swear an oath to fight for Alfred once again in order to avoid facing trial for killing a priest in a church. Bebbanburg, it seems, can wait (and it’ll have to, for the TV series is only on the third novel of Cornwell’s series; there are now ten, with the latest – published late last year – focussing on, you’ve guessed it, a much older Uhtred’s continuing ambition to capture the place).

It’s been noted by various critics that this show – what with the muddy fight scenes, men with beards claiming to be kings, regular killings-off of characters and all that – is very much a British version of Game of Thrones; the same idea but done on a smaller scale, with less overtly naughty stuff (swearing, nudity, etc). That’s as maybe, but what that somewhat easy analysis overlooks is that The Last Kingdom is no fantasy epic – this is historical drama, based on a series of novels which are themselves about stuff that (mostly) really happened. It’s very well acted, with – get this – Scandinavian actors having been cast in the Viking roles, and I’m prepared to forgive the whole thing about what accent Uhtred’s speaking with as there have been far worse accent-related transgressions on the box; at least the viewer can clearly understand Mr Dreymon even in the fight scenes!

Endeavour (the fourth series)

What with the excitement over the new series of Sherlock earlier this year, I criminally managed to overlook the latest series of Endeavour. Both shows had their fourth series on the telly back in January, and for what it’s worth some of the episodes of said series were broadcast on the same nights, and while the BBC’s modern-day reinterpretation of Sherlock Holmes is the one that’s been getting all the attention (as well as more viewers) it has to be said that ITV’s depiction of a young Endeavour Morse as a junior police officer in Sixties Oxford is one of the best things on television.

[At this point, a spoiler alert is probably in order; if for some reason you’ve not yet seen the fourth series of Endeavour, please be advised that this blog-post contains information that you might not want to look at just yet. You have been warned.]

As well as making use of the central characters’ first names (even though Morse’s one in particular is hardly ever used, to the point where most of his colleagues don’t even know what it is), both shows take a format consisting of short series of long episodes (ninety-minute ones in both cases). In terms of British crime drama, this was a format pioneered, back in the late Eighties, by Inspector Morse and subsequently followed by the likes of Agatha Christie’s Poirot, Jonathan Creek and many others. Sherlock started back in 2010 and now has thirteen episodes under its belt, while Endeavour began in 2012 with a one-off pilot and is now seventeen episodes old. Sherlock is full of references to the stories by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and subsequent adaptations, while Endeavour’s focus of reference is the enormously popular original series, Inspector Morse, which was based on the novels by Colin Dexter and ran from 1987 to 2000. Both centre around gentleman-detectives, socially awkward but very clever individuals who can infuriate others as well as catch the criminals. Both are very well-acted – in terms of the support cast as well as the leads. Yet, for all the fuss about Sherlock, I’m finding myself preferring the more understated Endeavour. Perhaps I shouldn’t be surprised by this. When I was a teenager I read and greatly enjoyed Conan Doyle before I discovered Colin Dexter, but when I read the latter I found Morse – the beer-drinking opera buff who was allowed to get it wrong and have romantic feelings about the women he encountered while investigating his cases (however unrequited they may have been) to be a much more rounded, human and in his own way likeable individual than the emotionally cold, cocaine-taking Holmes.

A recap of Endeavour is perhaps in order. The third series, which aired last year, skipped over an immediate follow-up to the second series which ended with Morse’s mentor Fred Thursday getting shot and Morse himself getting arrested; it was instead briefly explained that the former survived, the latter spent a month or so in prison before being released without charge and the institutional corruption they’d uncovered got brushed under the carpet. Instead, writer Russell Lewis used the third series to experiment with pastiches of The Great Gatsby (with a disillusioned Morse in the Nick Carraway role), Dirty Harry (all that running around between phone-boxes) and Jaws (although, what with Oxfordshire being landlocked, the man-eating animal at large was a tiger rather than a shark) which were much more enjoyable than they had any right to be. A minor character in the tiger episode happened to be the father of James Hathaway, the sergeant in that other Inspector Morse spin-off, Lewis. The last episode was dominated by a bank robbery which went wrong; Morse and Thursday’s daughter Joan were among those taken hostage in the bank. On borrowed time in all sorts of ways, Thursday literally coughed up the bullet that had been in his lung since the end of the second series (in the plausibility stakes, that’s right up there with a man-eating tiger on the loose in the Thames Valley, but it didn’t seem to matter as much as it should’ve done) before tooling up and storming the building, leading to a tense denouement in which he opted to arrest rather than kill the villain (whose eventual funeral is depicted at the start of the Inspector Morse episode where Morse and Lewis go to Australia). Traumatised by those events, Joan, who’d been making eyes at an oblivious Morse even though she clearly had a thing for bad boys, left Oxford.

In a departure from the previously-established format, the fourth series was set mere weeks after the third rather than the following year, so in the Endeavour universe it’s still 1967. This allowed Endeavour to fully explore the impact of Joan’s disappearance on her family (young women leaving home without telling their parents where they were going was a common enough feature of the time to inspire one of the songs on the Beatles’ Sergeant Pepper album, released in 1967); being of the stoical, buttoned-up generation that came of age in the Second World War, Fred and Win don’t handle things well as their once-happy family falls apart. Morse, having belatedly realised his own feelings for Joan, is badly affected too but he’s also not the type to go in for heart-to-heart discussions about said feelings, and Joan’s eventual return doesn’t really resolve this by any means. We viewers know, though, that for Morse and Joan there won’t be a happy-ever-after, for like many a great literary detective Morse is fated to be unlucky in love (and besides, she doesn’t even know his first name while he can’t bring himself to address her by hers even when he’s proposing to her).

Another story arc is the ongoing development of Morse’s simmering resentment against the powers-that-be, be it via his ongoing alienation from the conformist careerist Jim Strange (his future boss) or his anger over his missing sergeant’s exam paper (he, and everyone else, was convinced that he’d aced it, but his paper mysteriously got lost in circumstances that one assumes have a lot to do with his having got on the wrong side of those in high places) which resulted in a will-he-leave-Oxford sub-plot in which he was offered (via Strange, interestingly) a guaranteed promotion and pay-rise in return for transferring to a police unit in London. We viewers know that Morse will stay in Oxford (and not marry Joan Thursday or anyone else); although Shaun Evans could never be accused of merely impersonation John Thaw, it is however important for there to be markers for the viewer to see how this intellectual junior officer becomes the gruff, curmudgeonly DCI we all know and remember from the old show. But, what with that show having run its course some seventeen years ago, there may well be viewers of Endeavour who have no knowledge of what the young Morse will become (although I doubt that; as Inspector Morse gets regularly repeated on ITV3 it wouldn’t be hard for viewers who’ve been drawn to Endeavour with no prior knowledge of the original series to watch the late, great John Thaw as the older Morse).

Did I say the acting was first-rate? Shaun Evans as the young Morse and Roger Allam as Fred Thursday are both superb in their respective roles and deserve all the praise they can get. The support cast does a thoroughly good job too, notably Abigail Thaw as the journalist (who deserves better than to be referred to as John Thaw’s daughter every time her being in Endeavour is mentioned), James Bradshaw as the pathologist (getting the best lines and clearly enjoying himself more than he ever did in The Grimleys) and Dakota Blue Richards as WPC Trewlove. Some minor characters have developed a lot as the show has progressed, not just Joan Thursday (Sara Vickers is brilliant in her scenes with Shaun Evans) but also the straight-laced, old-colonial Chief Superintendent Bright who has become a more rounded character than the usual bewildered police chief trying to keep his detectives in order (which is what he was, more or less, in the first two series). He’s played by Anton Lesser, a solid character actor who’s been in a lot of good stuff in recent years – he was also the boss in that sadly short-lived BBC series The Hour, Sir Thomas More in Wolf Hall and Fagin in Dickensian, and he’s really good in Endeavour (in which he shot the man-eating tiger, and how many actors can say they’ve played a character who’s done that?).

The fourth series saw an emphasis on aspects of the Sixties which moved more towards the popular perceptions of the decade than has hitherto been the case in Endeavour. The ‘white heat of technology’ (previously glimpsed at in the first-series episode set in the armaments factory) was represented by a very big computer designed by some Oxford boffins to beat a visiting professor from the Soviet Union at chess (although Morse also used it to find someone’s address) and a nuclear power-station (the focus of the climax in the last episode). At a local hospital, some Carry On-style goings-on between a doctor and a student nurse soon gave way to something much more sinister. The Cold War put in an appearance, what with the Russian professor and references to the Cuban Missile Crisis and the prospect of nuclear fall-out in the episode with the power-station. Morse, we learned, can speak Russian which I don’t think ever came up in the original series. 

Then, of course, there was the culture clash of the second episode as pop music interrupted the classical music which Morse prefers. A caricature of Mary Whitehouse locked horns with the Wildwood, a rock band which was a fictional composite of various real-life outfits (there were nods to, among others, the Beatles, the Rolling Stones and early Pink Floyd). Both were of interest to the Oxford City Police’s finest – the former had been receiving death threats while the latter popped up on the police radar when some dope was found in a dressing-room they’d used, but they were later connected to a dead builder who’d become more involved with them and their groupies than anyone was prepared to admit to. The uptight Morse – seen as an oddity by the band members, what with his being a young man in a suit – was shocked by a gem of a revelation from Thursday about smoking dope during the North African campaign. The Mary Whitehouse character’s daughter – a smoker and a vodka-drinker behind her mother’s back – declared her love for Morse (he, being pre-occupied with Joan, didn’t reciprocate) and then fell out with her bigoted, domineering mother. The band’s manager’s alibi fell apart when it was revealed that the Kinks were banned from playing in the USA, so he couldn’t have been on the phone to someone in New York discussing their forthcoming tour (nice try, thinking the police wouldn’t know that; good thing WPC Trewlove’s got her finger on the cultural pulse). Bright and Thursday, their status as men from a bygone age emphasised more than ever in this episode, got to discuss the changing times and the nature of hatred. The pop music, brilliantly, was all done specially for the show by the people normally responsible for the classical music in Endeavour. The highlight of that episode, though, had to be the bit when Morse was forced to face his inner demons when he got drugged and started hallucinating (no Sherlock-style mind-palace for him, alas, although in Morse’s case it would probably be more of a mind-pub). 

The series concluded with an investigation into the disappearance of an academic in a rural village which seemed at first glance to be going the way of The Wicker Man (not a good setting for an earnest and determined copper) although in the event the villagers’ neo-paganism was a red herring; it was actually good old-fashioned jealousy that did for the academic, and in any case the nearby nuclear power-station was where the action really was. It was as a result of the finale in the power-station that Morse finally got his promotion – Hornblower-style, on the basis of action above and beyond the normal call of duty rather than by way of the exam – and he and Thursday both got medals, leading to a fine cine-footage-style shot of Fred and Win smiling outside Buckingham Palace. Does a well-deserved retirement now beckon for the character who’s been played so well by Roger Allam? With Morse now a Detective Sergeant, maybe it’s time for DI McNutt, named as Morse’s old boss in the original TV series, to enter the stage – although maybe not, as it’s already been announced that Roger Allam will be in the fifth series which is in the pipeline. There were a few questions that viewers might raise (the Thursdays’ son not being mentioned at all amid the furore of Joan’s disappearance, the Wildwood’s sleazy manager not being arrested for perverting the course of justice, Bright’s wife not visiting him in hospital, the lack of follow-up regarding the discovery of a dead Scottish hit-man in the boot of a car, how the GPO was able to replace or repair Morse’s phone so quickly after he threw it against the wall), but all in all I found the fourth series of Endeavour to be thoroughly engrossing and enjoyable viewing (once I finally got round to viewing it) and I am now looking forward to the next series. In the meantime, I might as well work my way through some old Inspector Morse episodes via the ITV Hub.

This year being thirty years since Inspector Morse first aired, there were nods a-plenty to the original show and it was fun trying to spot those in addition to trying to work out who the murderer was. I once again managed to miss Colin Dexter’s background appearances, but then I’ve always had as much success at spotting those as I have had solving cryptic crossword clues (in any case, author-spotting has been much harder this time around as the old boy’s now 86 and doesn’t appear in person any more). What with getting kidnapped by one of Oxford’s many serial killers and sneaking Morse into the power-station, Abigail Thaw’s character had more to do this time (I’d like to think that that was because Russell Lewis realised he was under-using such a good actress), and her father’s second wife Sheila Hancock made a much-publicised appearance as the Tarot-reading old lady in the last episode. There was a reference to The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner (the first film that John Thaw starred in), while I presume that the unnamed London unit which offered Morse a job was a nod to The Sweeney. I took a reference to what someone was ‘last seen wearing’ as evidence that they were attempting to do something silly like crow-barring all of the Morse novel titles into the dialogue in some way, although this turned out not to be the case (Thursday did mention Cain but not any daughters he many have had, and no-one spoke about a jewel that had been theirs or death having recently become their neighbour). That said, when Bright was hospitalised it was with a bleeding stomach ulcer, the same as what Morse had in The Wench Is Dead (both the novel and the TV adaptation). Actors who’d previous been in either Inspector Morse, Lewis or both were in evidence (the obvious one – Roger Allam – aside, there was among others James Laurenson, who’d been in the first-ever episode of Inspector Morse and who now played the wheelchair-bound professor in the computer episode). As with Sherlock, even the most trivial things are deliberately placed, such as lines and sub-plots which refer to minor characters from Inspector Morse (including Susan, the woman who Morse fell in love with as a student), music (always an important aspect of anything Morse-related), the made-up yet very plausible Oxford college names and all sorts of little puzzles; my favourite (now that it has been pointed out to me) is the name of the Abigail Thaw character, Dorothea Frazil – the word ‘frazil’ means ice crystals, so ‘D. Frazil’ means de-ice or, of course, thaw.

The latest series of Sherlock was good, after a mediocre start. But Endeavour is better.

Whig history and fake news (with Lucy Worsley)

Lucy Worsley has clearly been busy recently. The historian, Chief Curator of the Historic Royal Palaces and TV presenter (who has brought us such documentaries as The First Georges and Empire of the Tsars) was on Beeb One in December with Six Wives, and is now on Beeb Four with British History’s Biggest Fibs which re-examines certain aspects of our history. The latter is the more interesting, and it shows that there is nothing new about what we now call fake news.

If you haven’t seen it, there are no prizes for guessing who Six Wives is about and if you didn’t catch it you probably wouldn’t be surprised to learn that there were costumes (it wouldn’t be a Lucy Worsley documentary if she didn’t don at least one historical costume; this irritates some but I see it as a visual sign of an enthusiastic presenter getting underneath the surface of her subject), dramatic reconstructions that inevitably looked like low-budget imitations of A Man for All Seasons or Wolf Hall, and Dr Worsley telling the story in her usual engaging, light and energetic manner that’s a refreshing change from the affected bitchiness of (say) David Starkey. Of particular note were her insights into Anne of Cleves although these were pretty much the same as the impression of her that was given in the 1970 drama series The Six Wives of Henry VIII. To be fair, the saga that was Henry VIII’s marital history (all that, ahem, chopping and changing) is is one of the best-known stories from English history and as such I’d’ve been amazed if Dr Worsley had come up with anything new; to her credit she let the wives rather than Henry take centre-stage, but such an approach has nevertheless been done before and in this instance it could’ve been condensed into a single hour.

Meanwhile, Henry VIII’s dad was key to the first episode of British History’s Biggest Fibs which is a much more interesting and thought-provoking programme. It was Henry VII who, after defeating Richard III at Bosworth, embarked on a major propaganda campaign to assert the legitimacy of his claim to the throne (which was rather questionable, he being the grandson of Henry V’s wife by her second husband). He managed to convince people that he had been declared King before the battle, and set about demonising Richard with a vengeance. He asserted his legitimacy with symbols too. The Tudor rose, combining the red rose of Lancaster with the white rose of York, was created and adopted as his symbol, showing how he had unified the two rival royal houses (he’d strengthened his claim by marrying Elizabeth of York, Richard’s niece). But the red rose hadn’t really been used as an emblem by the Lancastrians, and contemporaries had never used the term ‘Wars of the Roses’ to describe the ongoing (yet surprisingly sporadic) conflict between the two rival branches of the Plantagenet dynasty between 1455 and 1485. Indeed, the idea of their supporters using roses to identify their allegiance owes more to Shakespeare’s Henry VI, Part 1 (specifically, the scene where the supporters pick red or white roses in the garden of Temple Church) than anything else; at Bosworth, Richard’s banner was adorned by a boar, while Henry used a dragon. Sticking with Shakespeare, who was writing during the reign of Henry VII’s grand-daughter Elizabeth I, the Bard drew heavily on the works of Henry’s chroniclers when writing Richard III, which presents said king as an out-and-out villain who is beaten by good in the form of the Earl of Richmond (Henry).

Aside from detailing the rewriting of history that Henry VII and his chroniclers embarked on, there’s a good point from Dr Worsley (as well as waving a sword in a field in Leicestershire, she gets to dress up as a Tudor-era Yeoman of the Guard in this one) about linking this to the Whig interpretation of history, which is an approach that seeks to present the past as an inevitable progression, with things always getting better and better; if used by a ruler (and throughout history, it often has been) then I guess it’s an approach that is not dissimilar from what we would now call fake news. As Dr Worsley herself points out, some elements of our history are a “carefully edited and deceitful version of events”. ‘Fake news’ may be a new phrase, but it is not a new phenomenon.

More overtly related to the Whigs was the second part of British History’s Biggest Fibs which looked at the Glorious Revolution. For many years this event was presented as a key to Britain’s subsequent prosperity by, for example, the Victorian historian Thomas Babington Macaulay whose History of England exemplified the Whig interpretation; the advances of British power in the eighteenth century owed much to the sovereignty of Parliament that had been enshrined by the Glorious Revolution. But how did the Glorious Revolution come about? Was it a peaceful transfer of power following the tyranny of James II, or a foreign invasion? Certainly James was suspected of aspiring to be an absolutist ruler and his Catholicism didn’t help. James’s enemies, who came to be called the Whigs, were not above the use of fake news to discredit him, for example with the rumours that his son born in June 1688 (the future Old Pretender) was actually an illegitimate imposter who had been smuggled into his wife’s bed in a warming-pan. James’s response, engaging with this craziness by publishing statements from those who had witnessed the birth (apparently, the number of witnesses was well into double figures), only made matters worse – the Whigs produced pamphlets discrediting the witnesses and their statements, and someone even came up with a map of St James’s Palace which showed the route that had supposedly been taken by the servant with the warming-pan, from the convent next door (where, the story went, the imposter-baby had been born) to the Queen’s bed!

Using propaganda to discredit a tyrannical ruler is all very well (it evidently works even better if his attempts to refute it can themselves be refuted), but how do you go about getting rid of him without risking civil war? The solution, as revealed in the cellars of a long-demolished Buckinghamshire mansion called Ladye Place (owned by an MP who indulged in publicity-seeking behaviour like using a court summons to wipe his bottom in public), was to invite someone else to invade England – that someone else being the Dutch prince William of Orange. Such an invitation was treason – the seven senior politicians who signed it didn’t use their own names (those were added later) – but in the light of what happened next this invitation came to be seen not as a treacherous act but as a plea from a desperate nation. Those seven politicians would be remembered not as traitors but as heroes, the ‘Immortal Seven’.

There’s more to it than that – the situation in England was linked to that in Europe, where the Protestant William was locked in a struggle with Louis XIV, the Catholic King of France. By looking at things from the Dutch side, it’s evident that William – who was married to Mary, James’s daughter – had considered invading England even before he was invited to do so; with the resources of England (and Scotland and Ireland) behind him, he would be much better placed to fight against his rival Louis. When he did invade (after sailing along the Channel, he landed at Brixham in November 1688), he was shrewd enough not to present it as an invasion, with his weapons of war including a printing-press which was used to print multiple copies of the declaration which presented his reasons for arriving in England; this propaganda campaign was clearly a success, for by the time he got to Exeter he was greeted not as an invader but as a liberator (even the colour of his horse – white – was symbolic, referring to a passage from Revelation which Dr Worsley quotes, while wearing a suit of armour of course). James fled; the Whigs said he’d abdicated.

There followed the reign of William III and Mary II, the only joint monarchy in our history – and it was enshrined by the Bill of Rights which barred Catholics from the line of succession and gave the Whigs the constrained, or rather constitutional, monarchy that they’d wanted. As Henry VII and his supporters had done unto Richard III, so William and Mary and their supporters did unto James II by denouncing him as a tyrant. Getting rid of a king and asserting the sovereignty of Parliament; revolutionary this undoubtedly was, and to a Whig it was indeed glorious; “if you win a conflict,” as Dr Worsley points out, “you get to pick its name”. You also get to ensure that your version of said conflict is the version is the one that gets the most publicity to the point where it can even be seen as fact rather than interpretation; William III knew this as well as Henry VII had done.

Some at the time called the Glorious Revolution a bloodless revolution, which wasn’t the case if one considers subsequent resistance to William in Ireland. In 1690 he met his father-in-law on the battlefield for the first time at the Boyne, and easily defeated him. This has been commemorated by Northern Irish Protestants every 12^th July ever since – or has it? In actual fact, the subsequent battle of Aughrim, which took place the following year, was seen as more significant at the time and that was the one that took place on 12^th July and was commemorated, but in 1752 the Gregorian calendar was adopted in Britain and Ireland. This led to the commemorations focussing on the Boyne (which had taken place on 1^st July, that date becoming 11^th July under the new calendar) instead; to this day, these commemorations continue to be an incendiary subject in Northern Ireland (William III – King Billy – is still very much either a hero or a villain depending on one’s perspective).

Perceptions change with time; in recent years the relative merits of Richard III and Henry VII have been re-evaluated (with the discovery of the former’s remains underneath a Leicester cark park sparking much re-thinking), while the Whig interpretation of the Glorious Revolution faded somewhat in the twentieth century (and yes, in the light of various revolutions that have taken place since the late seventeenth century some historians have queried the extent to which it really counts as a revolution). History, or rather the evidence that has survived, is always open to questioning and reinterpretation. Much like some of what we read and hear in the news today, said evidence is usually biased in one way or another and may well be exaggerated (or even in some cases factually inaccurate and/or intentionally misleading); one thing we can say for certain is that it was ever thus.

Sherlocked: going through the motions, or being too clever by half

(Note: contains spoilers. You probably wouldn’t want to read this if you have yet to see the first episode of the fourth series of Sherlock. You have been warned.)

Sherlock returned to our screens last Sunday, some seven years after Benedict Cumberbatch and Martin Freeman first appeared as the modern-day Sherlock Holmes and Dr Watson, and three years after the third series (although there was that rather disappointing one-off one last year which purported to be a reimagining of the original, late-Victorian setting of the Sherlock Holmes adventures but which turned out to be an extended dream-sequence). I watched it, because it’s Sherlock, and even though I will be watching the rest of the series I must say that it hasn’t been the most auspicious of starts.

Yes, there was an updating of one of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s stories. ‘The Adventure of the Six Napoleons’ – the one in which a criminal is going around smashing up plaster busts of Napoleon Bonaparte because he hid a stolen jewel in one of them, but he doesn’t know which one – became ‘The Six Thatchers’, the twist being that although Sherlock thought that the missing item was a jewel (with the same name as the one in the original story) it was in fact a memory-stick which led onto a bringing-up of Mary’s back-story which in turn set up the episode’s denouement.

 And yes, there were references to various other Holmes stories, such as The Sign of Four (Agra/A.G.R.A., the use of Toby the dog), ‘The Adventure of the Yellow Face’ (when Holmes got it wrong and asked Watson to mention the word ‘Norbury’ to him “if it should ever strike you that I am getting a little overconfident in my powers”, although in the original he was referring to the place in South London and not a disgruntled ex-MI6 secretary), ‘The Adventure of the Red-Headed League’ (the client who doesn’t think so much of Sherlock’s deduction after it’s been explained to him) and of course the never-written one about Sumatra (“a story for which the world is not yet prepared”), among others. The writers even managed to cram in a reference to John’s blog, just like Conan Doyle himself managed to have Holmes occasionally refer to Dr Watson’s write-ups of his cases (the conceit here being that although they put a lot of business his way, he didn’t care much for them).  

However, I cannot help but think that Sherlock has lost its way, and that the many references were there because they had to be, just like the bits where Sherlock acts like an arse because not only is he cleverer than everyone else, he knows he is. But these things which identify an episode of Sherlock as being an episode of Sherlock were mere window-dressing, for ‘The Six Thatchers’ seemed for the most part to be less Sherlock Holmes than some sort of James Bond pastiche. The solving of a mystery took second place to a tale of secret agents for hire, a fight in a swimming-pool, shady governmental goings-on, betrayal, a few overseas locations, much running around (including in the vicinity of the MI6 building, no less) and characters pointing guns at each other. By the time it got to Mary the former assassin being shot in the aquarium (I did warn you that this post contained spoilers) I was frankly past caring, aside from wondering how this compares with Tracy getting shot just after becoming Mrs Bond at the end of On Her Majesty’s Secret Service and considering that this might not be the last we’ve seen of Amanda Abbington, given how reluctant writers Steven Moffat and Mark Gatiss are when it comes to moving on from main characters after they’ve been killed off (witness the fact that Jim ‘Miss Me?’ Moriarty is still a major talking-point).

By the show’s own high standards, this wasn’t a good return. It’s not been well received and I cannot help but think that Gatiss put more thought into the poem he wrote as a repost to the critics; the writers have always been clever in the way they’ve adapted the old stories but it’s got to the point where they’re either going through the motions or being too clever by half. But hey, I’ll still be watching the rest of the series, which I hope will return to the old format of concentrating on solving crimes (I for one cannot wait to see what Toby Jones can do as a villain after his superlative performance in The Witness for the Prosecution, of which more perhaps in a future post), although there are hints at some more Holmes family business – as if Mycroft wasn’t being over-used already – with references to ‘Sherrinford’, the non-Canonical third brother. They do like to keep us guessing, don’t they?

The Capital Ring: Wimbledon to Richmond

To Wimbledon on a very warm September day, from whence I hoped to complete another stage of the Capital Ring. Expectations were high, for this part of the Capital Ring – according to my copy of London: The Definitive Walking Guide – is “possibly one of the finest walks in the whole book, with glorious scenery wall to wall”. Here was a walk with the promise of not one, but three open spaces – Wimbledon Park, Wimbledon Common and Richmond Park.

I am, it seems, not alone in my love of walking. In fact, it’s practically a national trait for us English! I am currently reading a really good book called How England Made the English by Harry Mount (the son of Ferdinand Mount, as it happens). When talking of the weather, he observes that: “Our temperate climate … makes the English obsessive walkers.” Later, he continues: “Because the English weather is so temperate, and the landscape so accommodating, there’s no need for walking clothes, luminous body socks or special shoes … The English walk long distances because nowhere really seems very far from anywhere else, and you’ll never get fatally caught out by the weather or the terrain … Walking has always been our thing – from the Canterbury Tales, through to the Jarrow March and the charity walks of recent years; and walking in all weathers too, because we know the weather’s not going to be that bad.”

For me, though, this was a walk that I approached with some apprehension, for last month I had managed to do myself an injury by going for a quick single during a cricket match; in so doing, I badly pulled my calf which had a knock-on effect on my Achilles tendon and resulted in ‘retired hurt’ going against my name for the first time. After several weeks of icing it and various stretching exercises, I hadn’t done much by way of walking and, although the limp had worn off, this would be my first post-injury big walk.

Having got the Tube down to Wimbledon Park, I set off into the park of that name; a pretty-looking waterfall garden led up to the lake, on which were three types of geese (Canadian, Egyptian, greylag) and across which could be seen the tennis courts of the All-England Club, then diverting around a watersports centre and then across the grass to come out of the park on the other side. Six-and-a-half miles to Richmond Bridge, my target for the day.

After a couple of suburban back-roads, it was onto Wimbledon Common – through the woods to the windmill. Bird-life abounded, with robins, great tits and chaffinches spotted in addition to the much more ubiquitous jackdaws and magpies; a green woodpecker was heard – that distinctive laughing ‘yaffle’ call – but not seen. I’d been told to watch out for wombles, although in the event I did manage to spot a fox. (As well as those creatures who used to collect and recycle rubbish, by the way, my TV-memory of this large piece of open space also includes that episode of Bottom where Adrian Edmondson and the late, lamented Rik Mayall attempted to go camping – the one which wasn’t broadcast for two-and-a-half years due to a particularly brutal murder having been committed on the Common not long before it was originally due to be shown.)

The windmill, as it happens, was covered in scaffolding. It is, apparently, the last hollow post flour mill (whatever that means) in the country; Robert Baden-Powell wrote part of Scouting for Boys there, and it’s now a museum. I passed on by, also passing the club-house of the London Scottish Golf Club before heading downhill to a small lake called Queensmere (also spelled as Queen’s Mere on some maps); there, I saw a grey heron. I then continued, across the golf course – spotting a male kestrel flying overhead and crossing Beverley Brook (which has its own accompanying walk, from New Malden station to the point where said brook enters the Thames near Putney) before crossing the A3 at the Robin Hood Roundabout.

And so to Richmond Park – London’s largest Royal Park, a designated Site of Specific Scientific Interest and, at around 2,500 acres, the largest urban park in Europe. Within minutes of entering, I spotted a red deer – the largest mammal native to Britain; this one was a stag, sitting under the trees. Deer played a major role in the park’s establishment, for in the 1620s Charles I took his court to Richmond Palace in order to escape from an outbreak of the plague in London, and turned the area into a deer park so he could go hunting; just over a century later, the White Lodge in the middle of the park was built as a hunting-lodge for George II.

I followed the path up the hill to the oddly-named Spankers Hill Wood, having lunch on a bench at the top of the hill with a glorious view laid out before me. What a great day for a walk through this place!

After lunch, I had an ice cream at a nearby café before walking between the Pen Ponds, spotting more deer (fallow deer, this time) under some trees. There were plenty of ducks on the ponds – all mallards, from what I could tell – and ring-necked parakeets could be heard and seen overhead.

The signs took me across the Queen’s Road to the top of a slope with a good view to the west – although the view is better from the nearby King Henry’s Mound, a brief diversion from the Capital Ring path itself. This high point – a Neolithic burial barrow, it turns out – is named for Henry VIII and is said to be the spot from which he waited for a signal to tell him that Anne Boleyn had been executed at the Tower; there is, though, no actual evidence for this, with some sources claiming that Henry VIII was actually in Wiltshire, busy wooing Jane Seymour, on the day when his second wife went to the block. What is true about King Henry’s Mound is that it has a protected view of St Paul’s Cathedral, 12 miles away, which can be seen through a deliberate gap in the hedge (called ‘The Way’) and a specially-maintained avenue through Sidmouth Wood. To the west was a wonderful panoramic view – on a clear day, you can see Windsor Castle on the horizon (it was a sunny day for me, but the horizon was hazy; I could only just make the castle out with my binoculars).

Then it was downhill to the gate, and past Petersham Meadow to the path along the Thames. A very nice day for it, with some people hiring out the rowing-boats (£7 per adult per hour, half-rate after the first hour, users are advised to take the tide times into account). I continued past the elegant Richmond Bridge before making my way into town, with a view to getting the train back into Central London. I hadn’t had any trouble from the Achilles tendon, thankfully.