They don’t always fail. Some spin-offs have become television legends, such as Softly Softly out of Z Cars and Frasier out of Cheers. But it’s a risky business, like taking a cutting from a favourite shrub; you’re just as likely to end up with so much dead wood. No amount of hormone rooting powder could help such recent wilters as Joey (clipped from Friends) and Swiss Toni (snipped from The Fast Show).
Nobody was more aware of this than Kevin Whately when, after several years’ resistance, he agreed to make Lewis, pruning his earnestly plodding sidekick character from the mighty fallen oak that was once Inspector Morse. There’s a typically Morsean Hamlet theme running though this pilot, in fact, and the ghost of John Thaw’s character does rather haunt proceedings, albeit in a helpful, benevolent, non-revenge-seeking way. “It was John ‘s show,” says Whately. “As far as I was concerned, Lewis was a sounding-board. It was Morse who carried the show. Without John there, I couldn’t see the point of doing it again.”
This is not Whately’s first experience of a delayed revival, of course. I met him three years ago, when he was about to reappear as the naive worrier Neville in the Cuban series of Auf Wiedersehen, Pet. Then he explained how the Geordie workman had “sandwiched” his role as Morse’s “everyman” side-kick. “Going back to that didn’t worry me so much,” he reflects now, “because Auf Wiedersehen was so popular. It was like being in a rock band. Kids who were far too young to have seen it would come up to me and say they had watched their dads’ tapes. We enjoyed that hugely, so it didn’t seem a retrograde step at all. If I hadn’t enjoyed it so much, I probably wouldn’t have done this.”
Yet the expat builders saga was an ensemble piece, with a powerful and strongly bonded cast. “Lewis is a different kettle of fish, because there’s no John Thaw, to put it mildly.”
The idea had been mooted long ago, he says, but Whately’s reservations were “absolutely huge”. It took a trusted producer and script editor who “made all sorts of assurances that it would have a decent budget and good production values” and a nudge from his wife, the actress Madeleine Newton, to convince him. Both the producer and Whately spoke to Thaw’s widow, Sheila Hancock, who was apparently delighted for him to do it.
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“John always used to say: ‘It’s important to come out of a different corner,’ and my wife said I’d really have to motor the show, that it would be a different ball-game altogether, building a relationship with another sidekick, with Laurence.”
This is a reference to Laurence Fox, the son of the veteran actor James, who plays Lewis’s own “bagman”, DS James Hathaway. The two men’s uneasy double-act provides the new show with a stringent underlying dynamic.
Hathaway is a Cambridge theology graduate, and former trainee priest, thrown out for “frivolity” and chosen for the police fast-track. Lewis, by contrast, has just returned from a spell training police in the British Virgin Islands, sporting a selection of loud shirts, and is about to be put out to grass. “He’s potentially a very interesting character,” says Whately, “with his Cambridge background and the seminary stuff. He’s more spiritual.” It is Hathaway who picks up on the Hamlet references that lead Lewis to his solution. “He’s meant to be, in effect, a young Morse.”
In one respect the old boss/“bagman” relationship has been preserved, though. “Hathaway has usurped Lewis’s old role because Morse was quite a technophobe and didn’t know his way around computers. They have conveniently forgotten that and made Lewis the dinosaur and Hathaway the technical whiz-kid.
“I don’t think I got him the part,” adds Whately, “but I happened to catch the last five minutes of Colditz the night before one of our dinners when ITV were trying to persuade me to do it. Laurence was, in effect, committing suicide, wandering out in front of the German guards to get shot. I thought he looked interesting and very English, so I told them I’d seen an impressive-looking lad, and he ended up getting it.”
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Not that the old boss is forgotten. “I like the way the writers (Stephen Churchett and Russell Lewis) have handled the ghost of Morse, flitting around and feeding the plot,” says Whately. “I liked the mathematical brain-teaser (a key element in the plot). It’s nice and Morsean, or Oxfordian — very academic.”
In the opening sequence, Lewis is almost run over by a classic burgundy Jaguar, though not Morse’s original, for which Whately shed no tears. “I love Jaguars, but I didn’t like that one. It was such a wreck. It had been written off several times in stunts. It wasn’t my favourite animal. It’s just been auctioned again, I believe. Good luck to the new owners!”
He was also delighted to return to Oxford. Colin Dexter, who wrote the Morse novels and owns the characters, insisted it was set there, he says, with Whately as Lewis. “Oxford always looks fantastic on screen. A lot of cop shows are shot in East Acton or east Edinburgh. The Cotswold stone’s very kind for lighting, and Oxford looks good from ground level, so you don’t have to break the budget to get a good shot, though we always go up the tower for that view.”
When they filmed there last summer, there were reports of mobs of hundreds of fans and the need for bodyguards. “There were absolutely chaotic days,” says Whately, “but it was you lot! We were inundated with reporters and photographers!
“And there’s the whole thing of academe, where you can invent these very wild, strange and brilliant people, coming up with weird ways of killing people. They’re so enclosed, those communities, Oxford and Cambridge, almost like Auf Wiedersehen, Pet, blokes wedged together in an enclosed space.” (An idea that might surprise the diners at a few high tables.)
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He has been offered several other cop-shows since Morse but said no. He says he gets bored with “procedurals”, preferring the fantasy side to Morse. Other shows “sounded like radio plays” or were too grisly.
So was it a good call? “You think there is some residual goodwill and a built-in audience for the Morse spin-off. It was worth doing a pilot to see how it was received. If people think it’s ludicrous without Morse I won’t do any more. But if people watch it and enjoy it . . . and I think it is enjoyable . . . I’m proud of it. We’ll see.”