I have been rationing my telly streaming, partly as a matter of discipline, for the past year. As I think I mentioned once, I signed up to the appallingly named BritBox because it had all of Inspector Morse and its prequel, Endeavour (I will never watch Morse’s sequel again, because it has that tool Laurence Fox in it, and if he reads this, which is admittedly highly unlikely, and thinks I’m “cancelling” him, then let him fill his boots). It now has all the original series of Minder, which comes with a warning along the lines of “comes with attitudes representative of the times” – and there are some astonishing moments – but on the whole the episodes stand up as examples of comic brilliance.
Why, I wonder, this retreat into the past? I suppose the answer is obvious, really, the present being a somewhat dreary place, and when Minder was running I was “studying” for A-levels; when Morse was running I was with the woman I was to marry, long before the wheels fell off that relationship.
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