Liverpool Sound and Vision Rating 8.5/10
Cast: Shaun Evans, Roger Allam, Sean Rigby, James Bradshaw, Anton Lesser, Simon Harrison, Joe Bone, Oliver Farnworth, Christopher Harper, Sophie Stanton, Olivia Chenery, Ben Lamb, Katie Goldfinch, Claudia Jolly, Jack Hawkins, Richard Riddell, Abigail Thaw, Christopher Bowen, Carol Royle, Tilly Blackwood, Caroline O’ Neill.
If murder is the most heinous of crimes then surely not that far behind it stands the actions of those steeped in the cruelty of the act of poison pen letters, hiding behind a veil of knowledge, allegations and threats. It is with little wonder that the action steeped in the malicious outpourings of the small minded or the intrusive meddling brain is rife for the exploitation of crime writers and seen as idols to look up to from those who seek to cause despair and wreak havoc in the modern world as ghosts spouting evil and discontent with the aid of a keyboard.
The act of poison pen writing is nothing new, not least in the detective story, it is one that forever intrigues, that seeks to ask the question of what makes people stoop to the level of desiring pain upon another human being, the belief that you somehow are acting as a messenger seeking vengeance for that person’s supposed wrongs.
A death by a thousand strokes of a pen, the misery caused, the suffering endured, and yet as Endeavour Morse soon finds out to his cost in the episode Confection, some deaths are harder to bear, the death of honesty, of respect, a poison pen may reduce a person to feeling violated, but the creeping infestation of corruption into a detective’s heart is as bad, it smacks of neglect, of losing purpose, something that Roger Allam as D.I. Thursday has managed to portray with sheer brutality of thought as his character’s moral compass starts to slide out of control.
Charged with maintaining order is one thing but when all around you is disintegrating, when your superior is faced with the decisions and questions of losing his wife to cancer, in a very marked appearance by Anton Lesser as Chief Superintendent Reginald Bright, is it little wonder that all is not sweet in the villages surrounding Oxford.
Whilst set in the dying embers of the 1960s post social revolution, Confection is perhaps the one story of the entire run of episodes that finds itself deeply immersed into a modern world, the poison still runs deep within some, enough to believe they are being warrior like as they control other’s emotions with their scorn, derision and false hope, the first drop of sweetener that soon betrays its bitterness. A tremendously balanced episode, Confection relishes in its glorious after-taste.
Ian D. Hall