“It is a long journey to this moment,” mused Sidney Poitier upon collecting the 36^th Academy Award for Best Actor in 1964, his watery eyes glistening in spite of the grayscale footage. Needless to say, the momentousness of this event, however hard we try, is largely lost to those of us born in the decades that followed it. But for Poitier, and the countless thousands if not millions who walked in the shadow of oppression, this was everything. A game-changer, the actions of this one man, quite literally, rewrote the script for black actors and actresses.

A native to the Bahamas, Poitier began life a world away from ‘the big screen.’ He was a foreigner by nationality, had little formal schooling, could not read and even ran into difficulties in his first audition with the ‘American Negro Theater’ company in Harlem, owing to his ‘incomprehensible’ accent. Peculiar especially, when we juxtapose this with the unparalleled stage presence and eloquence we marvel at later on in his career.

Poitier’s work was truly groundbreaking. Movies like A Patch of Blue (1965), To Sir, with Love (1967) and Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner (1967) constantly sought to redefine the role of the black man in American society. In The Heat of the Night (1967), Poitier famously demanded a scene to be rewritten. The screenwriters originally called for his character to be slapped and not to retaliate. Poitier refused, insisting that he should slap the man back with equal force. This audacious move illustrates the film pioneer’s deep concern social justice, pushing the envelope at every available opportunity. And we, the world over, are indebted to him for this very reason. 

• So it turns out Guy Ritchie is making a King Arthur movie. If you have ever nursed a secret guilty soft spot for a film, you will understand why yours truly is distressed by this: the Jerry Bruckheimer-produced King Arthur is camp as anything, and it features Clive Owen wearing the same tortured smoulder for nearly two hours straight as the eponymous chivalric hero. But Mads Mikkelsen is also in that movie. It was made before he narrowed his remit to (emotionally/physically) scarred psychopaths, and it’s really, really satisfying to see him hunk it up with shaggy hair on horseback. Apparently the schedule for the newbie has been pushed back, and we won’t see more of it until 2017. That may be time enough for me to let go of the past and welcome Ritchie’s inevitably metrosexual update. But I think I’ll only warm to it if he casts Jude Law in the lead role; and we should get at least one scene where Arthur and Lancelot joust, after a heated debate about whether a doublet should be Gucci or Burberry spins out of control…  

• Stills from Bridget Jones’s Baby have been released! Hurrah! Renee Zellweger’s bumbling heroine is back for the third time, to make me feel better about how ordinary I’ve become post-adolescence. Jones is the essential balm for all the young women who ever grew up expecting to turn out looking like Cindy Crawford, only to get stuck below five foot five while never getting smaller than a size ten and never having people faint at the sight of your face (for any good reason, anyway). I thank Helen Fielding for creating a woman who fucks up as much as I do but who still gets a happy ending with a nice man, who really ought to just run for the hills. In the words of the kids today, Bridget’s life (ok, Bridget’s luck) is my Hashtag Goals. And she looks like she’s having a good time these days — she’s getting lifted on a sea of raving shoulders! The new project has a few promising things going on: Patrick Dempsey! The return of the first movie’s director Sharon Maguire! The fact that David Nicholls has helped to write the script! The fact that Helen Fielding has realised you can’t just kill Mark Darcy and has thus rewritten everything so cinema audiences are spared the misery which confronted those who actually read the third book! But I’ll be honest. I’m a Daniel Cleaver girl. I think Fielding and I have had similar experiences of softly-spoken megalomaniacs in our youth, because she writes him to be adored for his dastardly ways, and the only time I’ve ever considered Hugh Grant sexy is through Bridget Jones’s eyes. I’ll miss him. I really will.  

• If, like me, you enjoy reading about the world of movies as much as watching them (any takers; no; none whatsoever?) then pop over to The Atlantic, who recently published a very interesting extended feature about the relationship between the internet and the decline of female film critics. It’s a very observable trend, and bizarre considering the fact that — as the article rightly points out —  the legacy of film criticism as its own art form depends historically on formidably talented women. So even if you’re the kind of (terrible) person who balks at recent attempts to redress gender imbalance in the movie industry, on all sides of the screen, consider this a tutorial in an oft-forgotten bit of cinema history as much as it is contemporarily polemical. It will lead you to the names of some of the greatest writers on film that ever were. Most famous of course is Pauline Kael, the New Yorker‘s one-time long-serving doyenne of the pen; but look beyond Her Majesty and you’ll find C.A. Lejeune and a whole host of other female critics whose words shimmer on the page (or screen). It’s an education in excellent critical writing, and should convince even the most sceptical individuals that more needs to be done to make space for women in the film journalism industry. 

• They’re making a Kindergarten Cop 2. WITHOUT ARNOLD SCHWARZENEGGER. I kid you not. Who the hell even is Dolph Lundgren? I know it’s straight to video, mercifully sparing cinema screens the torture, but even so. I’m game for a protest if you are. 

A very sick, very unsophisticated part of me wants to reduce And Then There Were None to this: sheer voyeuristic appreciation for a moment in the fourth act of the second episode. Is it now written into all of Aidan Turner’s BBC contracts that, at some point in any production he’s involved with, he must expose his torso? Am I allowed to recommend that it is? Does that undermine my attempts to pursue a career as a ‘serious’ film critic? Because I think it could feasibly be one of those actorly signatures, like Cary Grant’s combover or Sylvester Stallone’s grunt. I notice that the daringness of the Beeb is increasing incrementally in direct correlation to the growth of Turner’s small screen popularity. In Poldark we cut off at the hipline. In this, the boundary is renegotiated by the strategic lowering of a towel to accommodate a peek of his groin. I think the BBC is laughing at all of us, and as far as I’m concerned, if this is how they plan to get their kicks, they can laugh away. White flannel has never been so erotic, and I have never sunk so journalistically low.  

That aside, Turner is a genuinely fine actor, chameleonic in his abilities, and he injects the charismatic element – conveyed via the vehicle of a rather lovely Irish brogue – into what is a very fine adaptation of an Agatha Christie bestseller. The BBC have roared into the wintry season’s predilection for murder and mystery (onscreen, that is) by stripping back the shimmer, turning the heat down to a simmer, and littering a cast of characters with real heavyweights. Charles Dance, Miranda Richardson, Burn Gorman, Anna Maxwell Martin, Sam Neill, Toby Stephens… the list continues. Where the feeling is it’s difficult to compete with the grander-scale productions of CBS or even Netflix these days, they have cast off the strictures of theatricality and, instead, pulled inwards: the sombre, sterile location – a manor on an island in the middle of nowhere – is breathtakingly desolate. 

There’s a hint of True Detective‘s Southern Gothic aesthetic blended into the coarse, pastoral nihilism of the better Scandinavian dramas… but just a hint. Big, showy production values have been replaced with an attention, instead, to nuance: director Craig Viveiros commands lingering shots which pause over possible murder weapons. Characters are sharply focused as their faces modulate through various emotions, extracted from them however reluctantly. 

Ten guilty souls converge on the island under the impression they are attending for their own reasons; it soon becomes painfully apparent that this is a set-up, that their host is a spectre, and that they are all about to face their reckoning… that is, they’re about to be murdered, one by one. The most pressing question evinces itself as they disintegrate: is the culprit outside their group… or within? 

I watched this series with my mother (that is, I forced my mother to watch it with me). In the middle of the second episode she pronounced, through gritted teeth, “this is so… slow.” It wasn’t meant as a compliment. For my mother, a crime thriller is something in Luther‘s vein: tightly coiled around stormy allegro sequencing, chase scenes, mania, histrionic action, demented killers in masks. A hero – however damaged s/he is, s/he must be a hero – tries to uphold the law and, where the law fails, to uphold something more important: morality.

And Then There Were None is very different. To begin with, who is our hero? Everyone is unsavoury. Even the characters we find ourselves most drawn to (thanks to the favouritism of the lens) are either morally ambiguous, like possible child killer Miss Claythorne (Maeve Dermody), or utterly though charmingly ruthless, like Philip Lombard (Turner), a mercenary agent of massacre. 

Where Luther or Silent Witness or The Fall is a race against the clock, with the protagonist acting and reacting in an attempt to pin down the murderer, there is no such energy in And Then There Were None, possibly because there isn’t really anywhere to run to and, to be honest, there’s no question of who the murderer is: after all, they’re all guilty somehow. It’s a waiting game, and the languorousness of time becomes a tactic of psychological warfare waged upon the audience as much as it is one waged upon the characters.

I actually believe this is the series’s greatest strength (my mother disagrees, but oh well). There is something refreshing about the stateliness of this descent into madness and disaster: it has all the terrorising inevitability of a classy Saw film. Dark rooms, low lights, terse conversations, paranoia, and the horrible, horrible ineffectualness of stasis – Christie’s most popular novel is her masterpiece of paralysis and here it has been vividly brought to life. People who have formerly been active agents of human destruction are forcibly re-calibrated into positions of absurdly passive haplessness. They make tea and wait to be assassinated. Sarah Phelps’s screenplays are refined things: endurance treks as opposed to hasty sprints, demanding a different but equally formidable kind of stamina. They exhaust us but compel us even so. We’re not asked to like our characters, but we are asked: do we sympathise? Do we not all fear that the ghosts of our past may wreak karmic havoc upon us one day? Can we not see, in their panic and undoing, something of what we, too, might become when faced with our own demise? 

Qualms? Some. A cast of such high-calibre actors means that not everyone can claim the screen time they deserve; both Douglas Booth and Anna Maxwell Martin feel offensively underused, but that said, somebody has to die first (and second). It’s not that they underplay themselves, but that talent forces talent to up its game, and by the third episode, where the final five are bringing their self-destructive all, those two pretty impeccable performances have been somewhat lost amongst the din of churning mental chaos. Still, everyone else gets a bigger chance to play to their strengths: Charles Dance is a vision of elegance, Turner smoulders without ever losing credibility as someone with real violence in his soul, and special mention has to go to both Burn Gorman and Toby Stephens, who fall away from their composed, authoritative veneers in truly spectacular fashion. The scene stealer, however, is Maeve Dermody, the ingenue: her reserved, unknowable Vera Claythorne begs to be fully comprehended and is the great enigma who glues our eyes to the screen. She handles the demands of her role with a pursed, slight deftness where actresses with more prestigious resumes would have quickly failed. 

And Then There Were None is a particular kind of crime thriller which may only suit a particular kind of viewer. But if you can stomach the nausea of listlessness, the reward is a quality drama which probes at the darkest heart of what it means to be human. Time rolls on towards only one certainty: the end of us. It’s not a case of how, or even of when – but of whether death itself will administer justice to the terrible things we do.

Detective Constable Endeavour Morse (the phenomenally underrated Shaun Evans) follows the swelling strains of beat music towards an open door; he opens it. Inside, he finds a gramophone, the tall walls of a stately drawing room, and a flurry of voile drapes. Two women dance, glittering in their carefree decadence, drinks in hand, gossiping, as time slows down and clasps one woman in the fist of slow motion. Her eyes meet Morse’s – we’re seeing this from his P.O.V. – and she smiles; and for a moment, it seems wholly possible that this is the most glamorous, most beautiful, most desirable woman in the whole wide world. 

The viewer – at least, the viewer who’s taken A-Level English, or seen any Baz Luhrmann movies of late – may start to feel a little niggle at this point. The niggle of… recollection?  

She flirts provocatively with our taciturn hero, who’s receptive, if a little taken aback. Introduces her friend. Informs us that she is called Kay, that her friend is a famous tennis star. Enter deja vu. Perhaps we’ve seen this before; maybe we know this story already? Conversation turns to her unknown neighbour, whom Morse mentions by name.

“Bixby?” says Kay, stunned. “What Bixby?” 

“‘Gatsby? What Gatsby?'”

From there, I assumed that would be the end of the allusions; or that we might take a swift tour through the entry-level book lists of aspiring undergrads, accommodating snippets of 1984 and Wuthering Heights. I presumed it was meant to be a cheeky screenwriter’s nod to the bookshelves of seventeen-year-olds who draft up their personal statements and send them to the Oxford Admissions people, hoping that a flash of F. Scott Fitzgerald, like Orwell and Brontë, demonstrates a discerning student’s eye. 

But no – forget the odd flourish of extra-textual knowledge: Endeavour, Series 3, episode 1 is actually a full-out exercise in adaptation, with the bejewelled wildness of 1920s New York transposed into 1960s Oxford. The Great Gatsby is injected into the world of Mary Quant-clad upper class yuppies, who inhabit impossibly huge stately manors on the banks of the Cherwell; and our young detective, still trying to shake off the psychological damage wrought by the wrongful incarceration which formed the coda of series 2’s finale, is thrust somewhat awkwardly into the role of a latter-day Nick Carraway. Morse circumnavigates the listless lives of the upper set he once attended university with, observing the pitfalls of what happens when romance and social background collide on the surface of good old Oxford class boundaries. 

It’s all there: dialogue is warped, scenes are shoehorned, characters are mapped onto characters, and the parties glimmer with the familiar vapidness of rich kids at play. There’s a Daisy, a Jordan, a Tom… and, of course, there’s the icon himself – “Bixby”, who has adopted the affectation of calling everybody “old man” (which anyone who’s ever encountered an actual posh person will tell you they just don’t do). 

It’s a strange phenomenon, as adaptations go; for Endeavour takes Gatsby then expands the possibilities of the novel’s famous plot. After all, in this episode Gatsby/Bixby “dies” halfway through. From thereon in we shift in content, and the narrative takes on a guise which, when it unravels at the end, suspiciously resembles Christopher Nolan’s The Prestige. One presumes the correspondences are sheer coincidence, as while it seems likely that the Gatsby nod was supposed to be obvious to anyone who knows the story, it would be a strange writer indeed who thought The Prestige was just as well known. Still, it’s the placement of Oxford’s most famous fictional detective within the redressed parameters of one of the world’s most famous tragedies which creates the episode’s strange vortex of appropriation.

In some places you cringe – especially when, possibly in the interests of avoiding plagiarism claims, screenwriter Russell Lewis modifies dialogue from the novel into simpler, less poetic English. The problem is that Morse is already much more sophisticated a personality than Nick Carraway has ever been; his proclamations about the past and about Bixby being the “best of them” echo Nick’s lines from the book in drabber prose than Fitzgerald’s, but the naivety just doesn’t quite suit the silver tongue of Evans’s tainted genius. They wouldn’t have suited him even if the screenplay quoted the novel word by glorious word.

Otherwise, in some places, it’s actually quite profound. 

Do you think of Gatsby as an Oxford novel? Despite its being located in New York, Oxford in the novel is a pervasive spectre: a place never visited except, at first, in rumour, and then eventually in memory. While Gatsby remains a magnanimously unknowable figure, that he’s an “Oxford man” is as deliriously circulated as the claim that he once killed somebody. The American Bright Young Things fill their vacuous existence with speculation. Murderers and academics are apparently glamorously synonymous, and Oxford, by dint of this, becomes symbol of elegant danger and authoriser of respectability all at once. Gatsby can be a homicidal maniac, for all his guests care; if he’s got the right education, then he wears the veneer of a gentleman, and in Fitzgerald’s acerbic interrogation of flapper-age hypocrisy, the glittery surface of people is all that seems to matter. 

In Endeavour, Bixby’s elusiveness inverts the Gatsby myth. Everyone has of course already studied at Oxford; so Bixby claims to have gone to Yale, and nobody is really that bothered – Ivy League / Red Brick access credentials lose their glimmer amidst equals. In this post-university world, days are filled with fleeting, meaningless excitements: parties, alcohol, extramarital affairs, cocaine, heroin. It looks like every stereotype going and, of course, for a slim volume of Oxford students and alumni, it’s not too far off the mark. The rich ex-students have already been underwhelmed by the people that their university days have turned them into, and what’s far more enticing about their mild-mannered host are his ties to a narcotic criminal network. 

Instead, Endeavour series 3 re-calibrates Gatsby so it can accommodate a concern that has subtly pervaded the previous two series: the liminal position of people like Morse, who enter Oxford University without the safety cushion of an upper set background, and who must negotiate the boundaries of class which reappear somewhat once they leave.

It has always been the governing question of the programme: who is Endeavour Morse? Is he just a cerebral detective – or is he underselling himself? Was there something “more” he could have been if only he’d better advertised his academic prowess? Is there is a self-stratifying genetic code at work under the surface of this cloistered little academic community, which only invites the underprivileged for a short stay but keeps the affluent indefinitely cosy? After all, Morse’s friends, for all their money, seem to like him – it’s his soul at stake in their company, not his reputation. 

Is Morse an “Oxford man”? And if he is, is that moniker about as illusory for him as it is for the Great Gatsby himself? 

Morse re-enters a world he used to know; the camera allows us to see it all afresh, as he does. This world of decadence and excess masks the nihilistic misery of people who’ve already seen and done everything and largely had everything achieved by their predecessors before they were even born. The result is an ongoing ennui which comes perilously close to communally-enforced depression. It’s hard to be envious of them, with their sprawling lonely houses and their breeding checklists in lieu of real love. None of Morse’s rich hedonistic friends appear truly happy in their privileged existence, and they cling, desperately, to their status, trying to solidify a crumbling social hierarchy and preserve an archaic upper class in a protective layer of snobbery, shutting out the would-be egalitarians. Or at least, that’s the feeling towards the end, when Morse appears relieved to return to the value system of the police force: loyalty. Loyalty fostered from real integrity, as opposed to shared class status, mutual misery and a lifetime’s worth of bullying. To quote the other literary giant quoted in the episode, Rudyard Kipling: “if you can talk with crowds and keep your virtue, / Or walk with Kings – nor lose the common touch…” 

But Endeavour undermines its own hopefulness. Even as the manor clan seem increasingly removed from the reality of Morse’s 1960s Oxford, the tragedy of Daisy and Gatsby (sorry – Kay and Bixby) and their inability to scale the verticality of class difference on love alone haunts beyond the end credits; because if the 1920s can be so easily accommodated by the 1960s, surely it follows that the 1960s can be just as easily be accommodated by today? 

What Endeavour manages to do, every year, when I watch the series debut in my living room, at home in Liverpool – far removed from the enticingly glamorous spell that Oxford occasionally casts – is make me recognise more than I would necessarily like to. Sure, the bacchanal subset of entitled individuals who hurtle towards bored self-destruction in a rage of sex, alcohol and class As isn’t one we regularly confront; and if we do, they’re certainly not the people we expect to be holing up with for the rest of our lives. We’ve come a long way since then, to misquote the episode: nowadays everyone can be anything, and nobody feels the rift imposed by money and family when they’re chasing a deadline, and who even wants to fester in loneliness, however expensive? 

But do you, like me, ever feel vaguely uneasy: do you ever wonder if you, like Gatsby, are trespassing on a territory you weren’t made for, and that one day, perhaps, they will find out your fraud? Do you ever wonder if love is inadequate to the gilded perimeter which life and history set up between us, and them?

The Christmas spirit never dies at this paper. Although we are coming to the end of the festive season, preparation for the next has already begun. Recently Netflix approached Cherwell with a proposal to buy our weekly theatre preview show ‘A View From the Cheap Seat’. The contract outlines a plan to turn our show into a multi million-dollar festive Christmas TV franchise. The proposed ‘A View from the Cheap House of Narcotic Christmas Cards‘ will detail the exploits of a balding power hungry South Carolina property developer who builds a low quality Christmas card factory as a money-laundering front for a local Columbian narco-traficking gang. It will be set in Oxford and will include all the best of Netflix’s (and Cherwell’s) original shows.

The Netflix producers assured Cherwell that the venture will combine the charm of Oxonian crime dramas (think Inspector Morse and Lewis) with the titillating ‘edge’ of American power politics and internal South American drug wars. If the Netflix incarnation of Top Gear flops, we’ve been further promised that Jeremy Clarkson will himself take the role of the Frank Underwood(esque) property developer. But we insisted that given the natural reserve of talent at Oxford, the fitting Mr Clarkson will not be needed to play the role of the shameless profiteer.

Oxford residents have reported sightings of film crews around Jericho and other classic Cheap Seat locations. Among these, the Cherwell office has (with surprisingly few adjustments) been adapted into the headquarters of a Central American drug lord. Meanwhile producers have been touring some of Oxford’s over priced sub standard student accommodation – to get a feel for the immorality of the lead character’s real estate ambitions.

Cheap Seat creator, Mark Barclay, has taken a role in safeguarding the legacy of his project. He recently accepted a minor role as the property developer’s sex slave in exchange for the intellectual property rights to the show. He hopes that this role will bolster his prospects of being cast in a piece of new writing at the BT.

The talent behind the camera is uncertain but negotiations are underway to split the direction between Wes Anderson and Quentin Tarantino. The former will bring the dreamy haze and the latter the violent spires – jointly creating a terrifying and beguiling vision of a house price wrecked Oxford. Having visited the town, both directors say they will forego their stylizations in favor of cinema verite.

The town welcomes the investment, but not all who wear the gown are pleased. Christ Church felt snubbed after not being chosen as the main location. We explained to the college authorities that the predominant trend in contemporary television is escapism – so there would be no appeal in using Christ Church as the backdrop to a cocaine filled saga of socio-economic injustice. Conversely, members of St Catherine’s College were indignant that a similar logic was not applied when their premises were selected as the set for the Columbian drug cartel’s money laundering Christmas card factory. 

This promises to be an exciting time for Cheap Seat and we will sorely miss our humble origins. We thank you again for watching and ask you to look out for the global release of ‘A View From the Cheap House of Narcotic Christmas Cards’.