First on this tape, Inspector Morse and a story called Masonic Mysteries. An excuse for lots of Mozart, as Morse is in the Chorus for a production of The Magic Flute.
Remember Phonecards?
A friend of Morse is murdered when she’s called away for a phonecall. He’s changing at the time so he runs to find her body, and because he’s clearly a total idiot, he lifts her up and hugs her dead body, then picks up the knife that’s lying next to her. And it’s like this that he’s found when more people come into the room.
Incidentally, this episode is directed by Danny Boyle.
Due to the circumstances, Morse is suspended, and the case is run by Chief Inspector Bottomley, played by Richard Kane, who was Greg Kettle in Hot Metal.
Morse doesn’t like Bottomley, partly because he’s a mason. Given the title, and Mozart’s Magic Flute, you can bet that the masons will be involved, or at least Morse will believe they are.
He visits his old Chief Inspector, played by Iain Cuthbertson.
When he returns to his car, someone has scratched masonic symbols all over it. Morse is clearly being targeted.
He’s stopped and breathalyzed by a young constable, who’s also a mason. I totally didn’t recognise Mark Strong until his name came up in the credits.
And next morning, there’s more vandalism.
They check where the victim worked, and find that she (or someone) has transferred almost £100K into Morse’s bank account.
Then, despite Morse saying he’s never been at the victim’s home, Bottomley rather triumphantly shows him all the evidence he’s found that Morse was there, most damningly of all, a completed Times Crossword. Guilty!
Morse is arrested, and Lewis and Bottomley go to his house, where a crowd of neighbours are banging on the door, because The Magic Flute is playing continuously at huge volume.
Even worse, look who turns up dead at Morse’s house. It’s Iain Cuthbertson.
Even Lewis is put in the frame, as Bottomley points out that a lot of the mitigating evidence came from him, as he’s been with him all the time. But Lewis realises that all the evidence about Morse’s past that seems incriminating, came from the computer, and one of his old cases had the details changed to make it appear as if Morse had beat a woman up. Lewis checks the records of the local paper to confirm Morse’s version, that it was the woman’s husband, who he put away. So Morse is released.
But it’s not over, as someone has set a fire in his living room. He needs a smoke alarm (although the bad guy would probably have taken out the batteries).
Lewis is back on the computer, tracking the money put into Morse’s account, when a ‘virus’ attacks.
Morse finally tracks his nemesis down by his love of claret, and it’s the Emperor, Ian McDiarmid.
After this, over to BBC2 for Arena – Oblomov. It’s a semi-drama about the famous Russian character Oblomov, a lazy aristocrat from the 19th Century, remade as a lazy party bureaucrat in the time of Perestroika. He’s played by George Wendt (undoubtedly the only reason I recorded this).
Ronald Fraser plays his chauffeur.
It didn’t grab me, I have to admit.
BBC Genome: BBC Two – 26th January 1990 – 21:30
After this, there’s a trailer for A Wake for Sam, programmes in tribute to Samuel Beckett, who died last month.
Then, the start of Newsnight. It leads with a story about ‘Brilliant Pebbles‘, a US space defence project that was supposed to be able to knock out ICBMs before they could deploy their warheads.
One strange boast by the project’s director Lowell Wood, was that the control systems required the processing power of a Cray One supercomputer, and that they’d successfully built a computer with this power ‘the size of a pack of cards’. Now, a Cray One isn’t particularly powerful by today’s standard, but in 1990 that’s a big claim.
The tape runs out during this report.
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