Television - Andrew Billen laments the last night of Chief Inspector Morse

On ITV on Wednesday 15 November 2000, Sergeant Lewis turned to his prime suspect with anger in his eyes. "Inspector Morse," he shouted hoarsely, "is dead." The dread words were said at last and, as sometimes happens when you are bereaved, your first thoughts were for yourself: how, after 33 films, was one supposed to cope with life without Inspector Morse?

In this beautiful final episode, The Remorseful Day, the chief inspector asked for no funeral. But never has there been a better case for a service of thanksgiving for a television programme. Thirteen years ago, when Morse began, there were no two-hour film dramas of this sort or quality. Its success changed the texture of peak time, not least on ITV, which became the market leader for crime series. Yet it is a tribute of another sort to observe that so many Frosts, Taggarts and, indeed, Kavanagh QCs later, there has never been a series to touch Morse itself.

It has been calculated that since Morse began, there have been 81 murders in the peace-loving Thames Valley, making the suspension of disbelief an act of levitation worthy of David Blaine; but here, at last, came one death that did not defy belief. If ever a television character struggled under the yoke of mortality, it was John Thaw's Morse on Wednesday. He looked old, haggard, tired. We heard about stomach ulcers and a health scare that had taken him off work. We recalled a previous diagnosis of diabetes and watched with despair as he continued drinking. But what was wrong, and what would get him in the end, was Morse's heart. Chafed by beer and self-pity, it had too long suffered the aches of melancholia, too long abjured the relief that might come from showing others a little charity. Morse died of his inability to form relationships.

The psychological portrait of Morse built up over the years was an astute one. Partly, we learnt through observing his relationship with Lewis, but each episode also brought him into contact with a villain who gave him a better, more bitter understanding of human nature. The Remorseful Day came up with a masterful final confrontation of this type shortly after Morse listened to Faure's Requiem, sung angelically by a hospital surgeon who did God's work by saving lives. Outside, the singer, Sir Lionel Phelps (T P McKenna), revealed himself as a bully, a misogynist and a doyen of "the erotic dynamic of power and submission". Faced so mercilessly with the dualism of man's nature, Morse clutched his left arm and succumbed to a heart attack in the cathedral quad. It seemed a terribly truthful moment.

The rest of this final episode was, as always, fantastic. As Colin Dexter, the detective's creator, admitted on an ITV documentary, The Last Morse, on 5 November, the police procedures were nonsense. (Detectives, for one thing, are grouped into squads, not paired off like Morse and Lewis.)

The plots were desiccated, mind-contorting crossword puzzles - this week's relied on not one, but two, lip readers - accessorised by name-that-aria, spot-that-quote clues. The title of the last programme was a case in point, both a pun on the detective's name and a snatch from a verse that Morse quoted but did not attribute (A E Housman's "How clear, how lovely bright"). In one episode, an anagram, "Around Eve", revealed Morse's never used first name to be Endeavour. In each, his surname was tapped out in Morse code by Barrington Pheloung's theme music.

But the intellectualism of Morse also gave it its unity, the reason for its setting alongside Britain's oldest academic institution and its excuse for its marked lack of car chases. Each episode was a dramatisation of Morse's thought processes. He even drank, he insisted, to think. But his rationalism coexisted with a romantic yearning for music, and for women.

It was touching and comic that, in the final episode, his physical decline was paralleled by an aesthetic degradation on both these fronts. Morse found himself enjoying the crass compilation CD Classical Charisma, given to him by Lewis (perhaps he knew he was running out of time to listen to complete works). Worse still, Morse found himself in love with the kind of fallen woman whom, in previous years, he would have dismissed. Dexter and his adapter, Stephen Churchett, did not spare us his love letter to this specialist in kinky rumpy-pumpy: "I'd rather be ill and nursed by you than be in full health and never see you again." This was truly pathetic.

In Kevin Whately's Lewis, however, hope sprang eternal. He started playing Parsifal in the car; an inspectorship was within reach. Who knows, one day even he might leave his family, fall in love and break his heart. For now, however, we were left with the revelation of what we already knew - that Morse's one lasting love was for his much barked-at underling. In the morgue, Lewis kissed Morse's cold forehead without knowing that he had been left a third of his estate, or that Morse's final words had been "Thank Lewis for me". For Lewis, as for us, how heavily fall the Morse-less days ahead.

Andrew Billen is a staff writer on the London Evening Standard

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