Each medium, written novel and televised version of it, has its own distinctive strengths—and weaknesses. In a crime-novel, a writer can get away with anything; can literally get away with murder, or multiple murders (as I know perfectly well). And if I wish to write “Lewis decided to risk jumping down the 20 foot wall, and happily landed uninjured,” there is no problem. In reality however, on TV, he would either break his leg(s), or call in a stunt-man, or get the cameraman to fiddle the scene. In a novel, I can put a convenient end to some wicked malefactor by having a pack of rabid Rottweilers tear him literally to pieces, and even describe the process. With TV, life is still regarded as a little more precious. The big advantage of TV, of course, is that the viewer can see what’s happening, and where it’s happening. A very simple example would be the fabric of the city of Oxford. Whilst I may indulge myself for a couple of paragraphs on describing the effect of sunlight on the cinnamon-colored stone of an Oxford college, TV can do it in a few seconds—and do it better. It is the combination of such camera-work with the accompanying dialogue, which is, and which has to be, the modus operandi of television, this being the only obvious means available of carrying forward the development of any drama. Why? Because it is not at all easy to think on TV. What is the point of any actor’s face filling the screen for twenty seconds or so, hand to face like Rodin’s “Thinker,” saying nothing at all, but looking—well, looking thoughtful, just above the sub-title “Do not adjust your set”? Unless—unless one has a quite remarkable actor (and John Thaw was such a one) who could communicate by silence, by the slightest movement of his facial features, and most particularly by his eyes. In a novel, if he so purposes, a writer may indulge in “thinking” all the time on every page, never veering from some “stream of consciousness” flow, even to get up for a cup of tea. Television’s compensatory benefit is the use it may so readily make of music. None of us expects (or wants) to find an occasional CD stuck on to the pages of a novel. But music has been a wonderfully appropriate accompaniment to many TV programs—as it was to Inspector Morse.

How important was music in the TV programs?

Early on in the series, one critic wrote that, for him, watching Morse was becoming a bit of a routine: bedroom slippers on, wine bottle(s) opened, phone off the hook—all rather like anticipating an evening with Schubert. Well, we’ll come to Schubert in a while, but let us start at the beginning.