If you’re a big fan of Inspector Morse, you might be interested in some of these unusual facts that I’ve put together for this article.
Colin Dexter, author of the novels on which Inspector Morse is based, has made several appearances on the television show. He can often be seen as a drinker in a pub, but Colin also played a camero role as a tramp. The filming was done from the top of Carfax Tower in Oxford, and apparently a real homeless man grabbed his bottle of methamphetamine and ran off. The real tyrant would have found out later that it was actually water!
Colin Dexter is a cryptic crossword enthusiast and the two main characters, Morse and Lewis, were named after Colin’s favorite crossword compilers, Sir Jeremy Morse and Mrs. B.Lewis. Other characters and places were named after the streets of Summertown, near Oxford, when Colin Dexter lived.
An interesting fact is that the character of Andrew Baydon was actually based on the famous disgraced real-life newspaper publisher, Robert Maxwell.
The car that Morse drives in the series is a vintage red Jaguar Mk II, and was bought for the series for £1,000, but then sold at auction after the final episode for over £20,000! What an investment!
Some of the famous actors who worked on Inspector Morse include Patrick Troughton, who is most famous for playing the second incarnation of Doctor Who. Kevin Whately, who appeared in Coronation Street and Gemma Jones, who played Bridget Jones’s mother, Pam Jones, in Bridget Jones’s Diary (2001).
British-based Australian Barrington Pheloung wrote the Inspector Morse theme song
Inspector Morse seriously detests spelling and grammatical errors. This can be seen in scenes where he reads a document given to him, as he always points out any spelling or grammatical errors.
The first episode aired on January 6, 1987, and the last on November 15, 2000. There were 33 episodes made, all of which were two hours long. The last three episodes shown in 2000 were seen by a third of the British population, which is 18 million people.
During the 1990s, one billion people watched Inspector Morse in 200 countries. Sadly, John Thaw died in 2002 and 800 friends, fans and family members attended his funeral, which was two years after the last Morse special aired on television.