Liverpool Sound and Vision Rating * * * * *

Cast: Shaun Evans, Roger Allam, Anton Lesser, Sean Rigby, Dakota Blue Richards, Lewis Peak, Caroline O’Neill, Phil Daniels, James Bradshaw, Abigail Thaw, Sara Vickers, Caroline Martin, Aldo Maland, Sam Clement, Jojo Macari, Lily Lesser, Michael Simkins, Felix Scott, Andrew Buckley, Barnaby Taylor, Xander Classey, Mark Arden, Louis Strong, Tom Paney, Anson Boon, Madeleine Worrall, David Jonsson Fray.

There is a difference in the way education is taught in Britain that even today in the so called equal aspiring society, the public school system is able to command more attention, more funding and finer applicants to further its own cause than that which would greatly enhance the prospects of those attending the old state school, the secondary modern by any other name. It is perhaps a one-way street which leads directly more to ‘an us and them’ situation felt by many.

Go to a good school and the contacts made will stand you in good stead for the rest of your life. Go to a school with fine tradition and impeccable standards and you won’t go far wrong; and yet in that murkiness of water that is stirred it is often seen that this is where the bullies and the tormenters learn their skills, where in literature the likes of Harry Flashman, the erstwhile rake and cad made substantial in Thomas Hughes’ Tom Brown’s School Days and made impressively hateful by George MacDonald Fraser in the collection of books that were to carry the anti-hero’s name, learned the ways of all who seek to intimidate and oppress the thought of weak.

It is in the finale of the latest series of Endeavour that the audience sees at first hand just how far those with that type of aspiration will go in the art of intimidation and it neatly follows the series arc in which the institutions much lauded in which the officers of British wars are born on the playing fields of England’s public schools. It is an arc in which the series reflects the changing attitudes towards the end of the 1960s and the freedom earned by those who sought absolute change and one in which the winners and losers in this society battle are clearly marked, leaving some of the older established figures fighting to stay on top.

Icarus may have been a legendary story on the effects of hubris, pride and ambition but it is one that to this day still rings true compared to many of the Greek myths and stories; fly too high, over reach your own point of comfort and the fall from grace is one of spectacular disappointment, of burning up in the public eye. This can happen not to just a person but the institutions they serve, the children of the damned, the officers in the field, the high brow policeman with so little to keep him afloat, Icarus is the perfect send off for an impressive series and one that does not mince its words when it asks the questions of who will fall.

Ian D. Hall