Unusual facts about Inspector Morse

If you’re a big fan of Inspector Morse, you might be interested in some of these unusual facts I’ve rounded up 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 bum. Filming was done from the top of Carfax Tower in Oxford, and apparently a real homeless man grabbed his bottle of meth and ran off. The real tyrant would have found out later that it was actually water!

Colin Dexter is a fan of cryptic crossword puzzles 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 streets in Summertown, near Oxford, when Colin Dexter lived.

An interesting fact is that the character of Andrew Baydon was actually based on the real life famous disgraced newspaper editor, 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 later 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 theme song for Inspector Morse

Inspector Morse seriously hates spelling and grammatical errors. This can be seen in scenes where he reads a document he is given, 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. 33 episodes were made, all of which were two hours long. The last three episodes shown in 2000 were watched 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 attended his funeral, which was two years after the last Morse special aired on TV.