Wednesday 11 November 2015

Two Stars are Born, thanks to last night's supposedly final episode of "Lewis" on ITV

A bomb has gone off at the home of a young Oxford academic whose even brighter brother has already been murdered. Police cars and ambulances are racing to the scene, sirens blaring. Neighbours are emerging from their homes to find out what's happening (rather tardily, given there's been a huge explosion several minutes' earlier - but let's not quibble).  Here you see my wife and son (on the right) leaving the house (actually, it's a house down the road):


And here's my wife, on the left, acting her socks off (I've never actually seen her look this perturbed), staring at the comings and goings at the house two doors down from us:


And here's our son, in a black T-shirt, clutching his mobile phone:


Here he is again (the chap in the hoodie on the left is potentially significant, plot-wise, which is no doubt why there were quite a few crowd shots):


Here are two views of our street from the programme - first, approaching our house:


And here's some of what we see from our front windows (without the police car, obviously - we haven't seen one of those in years):


My wife and son are rather blasée about their new-found televisual stardom, but I'm weirdly excited by it all - perhaps because Lewis is a programme I've always been fond of (it was a vast improvement on dreary old Morse, its snail-paced progenitor). The series, in its current form, is now over. But, unless Laurence Fox is simply too bored to carry on, I would be astonished if his DI Hathaway character doesn't eventually return to our screens, as he is undoubtedly the most interesting TV cop currently operating (although I wish they'd drop the "dad with Alzheimer's" subplot, and the new police chief isn't really cutting it for me).

Whatever, it's nice that my wife and son didn't end up on the cutting-room floor, and that they will be preserved - thanks to repeats, video on demand and DVD boxsets - for eternity. Fitting, given that my wife's almost supernaturally acute sense of smell was responsible for saving the house at the centre of the filming from being burned to the ground just over a year ago (which I wrote about here).

2 comments:

  1. Stars indeed, Central Casting awaits.
    Hathaway has grown in to a powerful character and, I agree, he will one day have an eponymous series drifting around the spires. I also agree, the new boss cop is wooden.
    It's been a most enjoyable series....and not a hint of transgender Marxists.

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    1. Hathaway's lack of sentimentality is (I suspect) the key to the series. I'm tired of over-emotional detectives - I'm more interested in how they solve crimes rather than to what extent they feel the victim's pain. One of the things I enjoy about Golden Age British crime novels is how reassuringly unemotional the detectives - police or private - are about their cases. The modern tendency to foreground detectives' emotional responses reached absurd heights in the recent ITV series, "Unforgotten" - you wouldn't catch Hathaway or Lewis emoting over corpses, especially 40-year old ones.

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