“Endeavour” Gets Hopping

Due to other obligations, I was late in watching this last Sunday’s installment of Endeavour, the Masterpiece Mystery! prequel to the classic Inspector Morse. And then, because so many plot threads from that Season 4 episode, “Canticle,” were tied up in the show’s concluding minutes, I sat through it all twice, to figure out where and how the clues had been dropped. Leslie Gilbert Elman does her usual bang-up job of recapping the story for Criminal Element. (Also check out her post about last week’s episode.) But one thing she failed to remark upon was the program’s outstanding title sequence.

Set in the 1960s, Endeavour—starring Shaun Lewis and Roger Allam—has incorporated that era’s changing culture in a variety of ways. Music has often figured into the atmospherics, but never so much as at the start of “Canticle.” That opening sets the tone beautifully with a bouncy TV song-and-dance number that seemed snatched straight from the early ’60s, but wasn’t. I had to search the Web for more information about the song “Make Believe.” Turns out, its lyrics were written by Endeavour “deviser”/writer Russell Lewis, with music by Matthew Slater. Performing the piece against a backdrop of young women spinning multi-hued umbrellas is lovely British singer/songwriter Sharlette Henry. Because I enjoyed that presentation so much, I am embedding a version below that I found on Vimeo, minus the scene cuts from the episode’s introduction.

I thought we could all use a melodious boost late on a Thursday.



READ MORE: “Endeavour 4.03: ‘Lazaretto’ Episode Review” and “Endeavour 4.04: ‘Harvest’ Episode Review,” by Leslie Gilbert Elman (Criminal Element).