Inspector Morse - Last Seen Wearing [DVD]

LAST SEEN WEARING was one of the first dramatizations of the BBC/PBS series of 33 episodes based on the character of Endeavor Morse, Detective Chief Inspector of the Thames Valley Police Department--serving the city of Oxford in England. LSW is actually based on one of the 13 books Dexter wrote, and contains a clever and complex plot. I think I'm fairly intelligent, and I read many mysteries, but I will say, I was baffled by this story. I read the book first, and recommend you do too.

The storyline is this--a young girl who is a day student at a private girl's school fails to come home one day. The police are called in to find the girl. Six months later, the girl is still missing and Morse is put on the case. He tells Sargeant Lewis, "She's dead." "Why do you say that Sir?" says Lewis. Morse replies, "Because I'm the three-file man. They bring me in when there are three files, and when there are three files, someone's gone missing too long." So the first mystery is this, is the girl alive as Lewis says, or is she dead as Morse insists??

If she is dead, who killed her? The headmaster of the school has been behaving suspiciously. His wife thinks his actions are odd. The assistant head mistress seems to have some knowledge she is keeping under wraps. And then there's the father who has access to all sorts of earth-moving equipment--and he's her stepfather after all and a wealthy one at that. On the other hand, one of the male instructors quit quite recently, around the time when the young girl disappeared. He moved onto a lower paying job in another school. Why would he do that?

For regular fans of BBC/PBS drama and comedy, the cast is filled with many familiar faces. Julia Sawhalia ("Absolutely Fabulous" and "Pride and Prejudice") and Hugh Grant's old girl friend (Estee Lauder model) play students. "As Time Goes By" fans will recognize the actor who plays Alistair. In LSW he plays the young male teacher who recently vacated his job at the private school where the female student disappeared.

The DVD is excellent. The shots of the English countryside are wonderful. The crisp clear photography reveals the black circles under Morse's eyes (he has a little alcohol problem) as well as the 20 layers of dirty green paint on the long corridor in the old police headquarters building. This is vintage stuff.

This is Set Two of eleven "Inspector Morse" Sets. Each Set has three episodes/discs. Don't confuse these eleven "Sets" with the previously issued (but still available) "Collection Sets". Each of the six "Collection Sets" cost more, as each has more episodes/discs than these Sets.

This Set has three episodes, all from Series 2 (what we call seasons in the U.S.). They originally aired December 1987 and March 1988 in this same order. The British Series 2 series included one more episode, "Last Bus to Woodstock", which has been moved to the next Set Three of these Inspector Morse DVD sets.

In "The Story of Morse" a 50 minute documentary about Inspector Morse, Colin Dexter says this: "If you're going to write right about forensics and pathology and ballistics and so on, obviously you've got to know your onion. But I know nothing. Absolutely nothing about that. And if you write who-done-its, in other words, the central idea of the author is to dangle half a dozen people in front of you, so you always guess the wrong one; never the one you thought of; never the butler, and all these sorts of things, the less you know of police work, the better! And you just want to mystify everybody, don't you?!"

Episodes:
The Wolvercote Tongue
Last Seen Wearing
The Settling of the Sun

THE WOLVERCOTE TONGUE:
A tour bus pulls into Oxford. It's a high-end tour with only 12 participants, lead by the tired and disaffected guide, Sheila Williams (played by Roberta Taylor). She rushes from the bus to meet Dr. Simon Kemp - whose name should be Dr. Shallow - only to have him tell her his wife says he can't see her anymore.

Laura and Eddie Poindexter are on the tour. The Oxford stop is important, because the wealthy Laura is donating the Wolvercote Tongue to the Ashmolean Museum of Art and Archaeology, the first university museum in the world, established 1677. The tongue is part of an ornate two piece belt buckle, somehow separated after they were dug up together. The Ashmolean already has the buckle.

Eddie returns to their Randolph Hotel room to find Laura dead and the Wolvercote Tongue gone. Was it really just a heart attack?

Trivia: This episode was written by Julian Mitchell, based on a short story by Colin Dexter. In 1992, well after the TV episode first aired, Dexter expanded the short story into a novel titled "The Jewel That Was Ours", though there are differences between the novel and the show. Dexter's walk-on is when he appears as the man behind Morse in The Chapter Bar of the Randolph. This episode is full of lovely wry humor, especially in the interactions between Morse, Lewis and Max de Bryn, the pathologist.

LAST SEEN WEARING:
Morse is grumpy when he's given a new file. It's Valerie Craven, a teenager missing for six months. The only reason he's given this missing persons case is that Valerie's father, construction magnate George Craven, is not just rich, but on the Police Committee. Lewis is raring to go, trying to give Morse the 3 files compiled on the missing girl, but Morse isn't interested: "I'm sorry to disappoint you, Lewis, but she's dead.... They put me onto these things when they can smell a corpse. One file - Anybody. Two files - Ainsley or McCay. I'm the three-file man. No, she's dead."

Another reason Morse is disgusted with handling the case. He's supposed to solve it, but he's not supposed to bother the family. He interviews the father anyway (which gets him in trouble). Lewis: "The thing with you is, if somebody tells you you can't do something, you go right on and do it, don't you?"
Morse: "I make it a rule."

This is a murder mystery, so there's going to be a body. But will it be Valerie's?

Trivia: This episode was written by Thomas Ellice, based on the 2nd Colin Dexter novel of the same name, published in 1976.

THE SETTLING OF THE SUN:
An Oxford school has a welcoming dinner for its summer international students. Morse is at the head table, next to his friend, Dr. Jane Robson. At her request, he created a crossword puzzle for the summer attendees. He's there to give a prize to the student who does the best on the crossword. Morse gives a little speech before awarding the prize: "On the whole, crosswords are far more exotic and exciting than police work. Most murders, for example, don't require solving because they haven't been planned. Thought a lot about, perhaps, over the years. Not as murders, but as silence. The silence of a wife, a husband, a son or a daughter, even. No more words, talk, screams, arguments, insults. Insults more often lead to murder than anything else in my experience."

During the dinner, a student from Japan suddenly takes ill, and leaves the hall for his room. He shortly turns up murdered, his body laid out as if a crucifix. Is this hatred left over from WWII?

Another doomed love for Morse. And his speech is prophetic - in the breach.

Trivia: This episode, written by Charles Wood, is based on the characters created by Colin Dexter. Dexter's walk-on is when he appears as the doctor sitting on the bed next to Jane's bed, in the very last scene.

If you own this episode on VHS there is no reason to purchase the DVD version. I am a big Inspector Morse fan and find this to be one of the better episodes but the DVD itself is horrible.
I cannot believe how a show as popular as Inspector Morse can be turned into such a shoddy DVD. The DVD contains no extras (although some newer episodes do contain laughable text trivia, ha!) The transfer is mediocre at best, and lastly the packaging is cheap. I recently purchased "Brideshead Revisited" on DVD, wonderful transfer, wonferful packaging, many extras including a booklet. Is it really too much to ask that the series be treated with a little respect, how about some extras behind the scenes footage? a director or author voice over? maybe an interview with some of the surviving cast? Its just dreadful in every respect. I can only hope the series is issued again by a company with more taste.