by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2017 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
The something on another
channel I was more interested in was the latest episode of Endeavour, the quite compelling British TV series concocted by
Russell Lewis and inspired by the character Colin Dexter created of Inspector
Morse, a police official in Oxford who investigates crimes, many of them
involving the university. Dexter wrote him in the latter stages of his career,
first making him an active alcoholic and then having him recover, but Lewis
decided to do a sort of prequel series showing a young detective constable Endeavour Morse (the quite
attractive Shaun Evans) “making his bones” on the Oxford police force in the
1960’s, solving crimes many of which involve the tumultuous political, social
and cultural forces that shaped that era. This episode was called “Canticle”
(I’m not sure why, unless it’s a reference to the rarely used second half of
the title of Paul Simon’s song “Scarborough Fair/Canticle,” which blended a
traditional English folk song with a countermelody, bearing a considerably more
intricate and self-consciously “poetic” set of lyrics, composed by Simon
himself) and dealt with the clash between self-styled moral reformer Joy
Pettybon (Sylvestra Le Touzel — the actress’s name sounds like a drag alias and
Pettybon looks like a drag queen
on screen) and the hottest British rock band of the moment, The Wildwood,
consisting of brothers Nick (Will Payne) and Kenneth (Michael Fox) Wilding —
Nick is the lead vocalist and Ken the lead guitarist — along with bassist (and
Nick’s friend since childhood) Christopher Clark (Jonathan Bamwell) and their
drummer, Lee “Stix” Noble (Dario Coates).
The two show up in Oxford at the same
time and get invited to appear together on a TV talk show, during which Joy
Pettybon blasts the Wildwood in general and their newest song, “Jennifer
Sometimes,” in particular for being too obsessed with S-E-X (she actually
spells out the word on TV instead of just speaking it), and Nick Wilding is put
on as a guest to defend himself and his song. The plot kicks off with the
finding of the body of Barry Finch, a workman who was working on the large
estate the Wildwood were working in during their stay in Oxford (and who isn’t
listed in the credits because we only see him as a corpse, though he’s the
hottest guy in the film and I couldn’t help but wish we’d got a chance to look
at him while his character was still alive!). It thickens when a Gay activist
and former newspaper publisher, Dudley Jessop (Matthew Needham), disrupts
Pettybon’s TV appearance and is taken out of the studio and roughed up by two
of her goons before Morse comes along, rescues him from the vigilantes and
takes him into official custody. Then Pettybon’s spiritual advisor, Rev. Mervyn
Golightly (Paul Bown), is found dead from eating a box of chocolates laced with
poison, and the police assume a) that Joy Pettybon was the real target and b)
that Jessop did it. Jessop denies it but explains why he hates Joy Pettybon: he
had a magazine called The Extreme Times, only Pettybon lobbied the censors to ban it, not only putting him out
of business but exposing him as Gay (at a time when it was still illegal in the
U.K.) and thereby keeping him from any other sort of job — he’s surviving on
handouts and an allowance his parents give him in return for never darkening
their door again.
Also among the dramatis personae are Joy Pettybon’s daughter Bettina (Pearl Chanda),
who can’t stand her mom’s “moral” crusade and who invites Morse to her room for
a drink, during which she tells Morse that the real reason Joy Pettybon is in such a snit about Gay
people was that her husband, Bettina’s father, was Gay and committed suicide
when he was about to face prosecution for it (under the same “gross indecency”
laws with which Oscar Wilde was prosecuted and jailed). There are also various
female hangers-on in the Wildwood entourage, including Christopher Clark’s wife
Anna-Britt (Kaisa Mohammar) — though their all-powerful manager and fixer,
Ralph Spender (David Starzaker), insists that they keep their marriage a secret
because the teenage girl fans of the Wildwood want to believe they’re all
unattached — and Emma Carr (Ella Hunt), who claims to be the inspiration for the
song “Jennifer Sometimes” (Jennifer is her character’s middle name) but who
gets into a jealous hissy-fit when she realizes both Nick Wilding and
Christopher Clark are Bisexual; that they have been lovers ever since their
boyhoods, when they used to go hunting for mushrooms together (before they
settled on “Wildwood” as their band’s name they considered calling themselves
“The Toadstools,” and they reference that fact in their big song); and that
Barry Finch was accidentally killed in a three-way with Nick and Anna-Britt at
the estate and Spender carted his body off premises so it would be discovered
somewhere else. There’s a marvelous hidden-in-plain-sight sequence in which
Morse figures out the clues to their real sexuality the Wildwood have hidden in
their latest album, including the master number on the disc itself that turns
out to be an anagram for the initials in the phrase “Each man kills the thing
he loves” and Oscar Wilde’s prisoner number at Reading Gaol.
There’s also a
bizarre final scene in which Emma feeds Morse an LSD-spiked drink and he goes
into hallucinations — she plans to kill him while he’s under the influence but
the other cops come and rescue him in time — Morse does enough on-duty drinking
in this episode (unlike the self-consciously virtuous American cops who insist
on never drinking on the job, especially not with a suspect!) — this after we’ve seen Nick do
his own acid-fueled meltdown and Dr. Bakshi (Sagar I M Arya) give him an
antidote drug — Bakshi is a sort of “Dr. Feelgood” who goes with the band on
their tours to minister to them in case they overdose — in a scene one imdb.com
“Trivia” commentator suggested was an oblique reference to the acid-fueled
burnout of Syd Barrett, original lead singer and lead guitarist for Pink Floyd.
Indeed, Lewis’s script, effectively directed by Michael Lennox (except for the
rather clichéd way he renders Morse’s final — and unwitting — acid trip), drew
on a lot of real-life characters
from the 1960’s: Joy Pettybon is based on a real “moral” crusader of the time,
Mary Whitehouse; in the opening scene the Wildwood are shooting a music video
also featuring singer Mimi (Sharlette Henry), who’s clearly based on the 1960’s
British pop star Lulu (best known for appearing in the film To Sir,
With Love as well as singing its famous
theme song), and the Wildwood themselves seem like a mashup of the Beatles, the
Rolling Stones, the Kinks (especially since the frontmen are brothers but have
an uneasy collaboration) and Pink Floyd, and the script references both Kenneth
Grahame’s book The Wind in the Willows (from which the name “Wildwood” comes) and The Piper at the
Gates of Dawn, Pink Floyd’s first album
(and the only one that featured Syd Barrett), which took its title from a
chapter in the Grahame book. This episode of Endeavour is an example of modern British mystery writing at
its best: quiet, literate, bloodless (we don’t, praise be, actually see Barry Finch get killed), sophisticated, richly
allusive and driven by characters rather than thrills.
