Good news for me: the series of ITV’s Endeavour that starts airing tonight will be the last. Hooray! I hate Endeavour. A lot. In fact, I would have italicised the word “hate” to emphasise the fact, if I hadn’t worried that it would look weird next to the italicised title of the programme. But please imagine it was italicised.
Just to qualify my hatred: I have never watched Endeavour and, having heard only positive reports, am convinced I would enjoy it. I haven’t watched it as a point of principle because, in my view, it shouldn’t exist. It shouldn’t exist because it spoils Inspector Morse.
I love Inspector Morse. (Once again, please imagine that verb in italics and “Inspector Morse” said normally.) It is my contention that the very existence of Endeavour is a desecration of the artwork that is Inspector Morse because one of the main things that is brilliant about Inspector Morse is the mysterious sense of the eponymous hero’s melancholy past. It’s only occasionally alluded to, but there is sadness there, disappointment, loneliness, injustice. This feeling lends incalculable depth and sympathy to the main character, just as a hint of long-boiled bones enriches a soup.
What totally spoils that is to go off and make 54 hours of television filling in the backstory. More episodes than were made of the original series! They shouldn’t have done that. They should have left lovely, perfect Inspector Morse alone and made up a new detective to do murder stories with. Of course, in commercial and critical terms, it worked. Millions enjoyed it, apparently not realising that it was a parasite sucking the spiritual blood of its host series, which ends up reduced to a shorter sequel that doesn’t even benefit from HD or any of those lovely panoramic drone shots that are now so easy to do.
There’s only one way to stop this sort of thing: you have to not watch it. And I have not watched it. That was a sacrifice. As a massive Inspector Morse fan, who has watched all 33 episodes of Inspector Morse more than once, I am a prime candidate to be an Endeavour viewer. The algorithms must be going spare. I am bitterly aware that Endeavour is a programme I am bound to like, possibly to love. But I would then lose perspective – my clear sense that Endeavour’s inception was an act of sickening commercial cynicism that damages society as surely, though admittedly not as badly, as selling payday loans or designing cluster bombs.
Anyway, I imagine I’ll see it at some point. The industriousness with which old ideas are energetically repackaged again and again grinds you down, very much like the shell fire in the first world war that I am sure is brought to life with savage brilliance in yet another sodding film about it which has just been declared the official bee’s knees at the Baftas.
I haven’t actually seen the latest All Quiet on the Western Front. I’m sure it’s nicely done, but then they’ve had several goes to get it right. And we get the point. Even back in 1929, when the novel it’s based on was published, the notion that trench warfare was something of a pisser was already well established and soon to be used as an excuse for turning a blind eye to genocide. I realise there’s a European war happening at the moment, but, for me, that note of morbid topicality isn’t quite enough to get me excited.
Is the idea that we’ve got enough stories now, as a species? Or authors, at least? Is that the prevailing wisdom? New stories will be worse so the best thing is to keep telling the old ones over and over again?
This brings me to the controversy caused by Puffin and the Roald Dahl Story Company’s joint decision to make hundreds of changes to the new editions of Dahl’s children’s books. The aim is to remove some of the nastiness to which modern readers might object – or modern readers’ teachers or parents might object on their behalf. This has been criticised by many, from Coleen Nolan to Rishi Sunak, on the basis, as Sunak’s spokesperson put it, of “the right to free speech and expression”. Suzanne Nossel, the chief executive of PEN America, an association of 7,000 writers that campaigns against censorship, warned sagely: “Those who might cheer specific edits to Dahl’s work should consider how the power to rewrite books might be used in the hands of those who do not share their values and sensibilities.”
The debate has inevitably focused on whether the publishers have been too “woke” in making these changes. Have they been soft, giving in to snowflakery? Have they betrayed the works of which they are supposed to be custodians? This is missing the point. Puffin said they made the changes so that the books “can continue to be enjoyed by all today”. How refreshingly candid. Substitute the word “enjoyed” with “purchased” (a process they’re presumably comfortable with) and we have the truth. There is nothing soft about making these changes at all – it is commercially ruthless. The recent announcement that the publishers will now keep the original versions in print as well is equally so: they’re frightened of the anger in the marketplace and are trying to placate all possible buyers.
Dahl’s publications are extremely lucrative. In 2021, his literary estate was bought by Netflix for £500m. So, despite the writer himself being more than three decades dead, his market share must not be allowed to diminish. Hence the major disadvantage that dead authors’ work previously suffered from – the fact that it dates – has been removed. It can all be rewritten. The huge plus of brand recognition that famous dead authors’ estates enjoy now has no compensatory downside. On the contrary, they can morph to suit the mores of any era – so much more accommodating to market forces than those pesky living authors with their obstructive artistic concerns.
It’s so empty and grasping. Ideas must be earnestly exploited to the full: remade, have sequels and prequels spun out of them, moulded to changing tastes. If you haven’t made all audiences absolutely sick of any intellectual property you control, you’re wasting money.
The saving grace here is that the current round of Dahl rewrites are tin-eared and dreadful. This attempted future-proofing may have ruined those books, like solar panels on a listed building. Perhaps some new stories will accidentally get a chance.
