Liverpool Sound and Vision Rating 8.5/10
Cast: Shaun Evans, Roger Allam, Anton Lesser, James Bradshaw, Sean Rigby, Abigail Thaw, Caroline O’ Neill, Carol Royle, Sia Alipour, William Allam, Pal Aron, Emma Cunniffe, Ryan Gage, Stephanie Leonidas, Jason Merrells, Hiftu Quasem, Rebecca Saire, Madhav Sharma, Deva Wareing, Shane Zaza, Flora London, Harki Bhambra, Buom Tihngang, Graeme Stevely, Ted Robins, Neil Roberts, Raj Awasti.
To understand a country in its current outlook, you have to delve into its past, the moment where perhaps today’s older living generation have set the tone and in which the rest have fallen into line with or which are actively trying to undermine, to create a finer version, or comprehend the fine line that separates the two, between tradition and revolution.
To bring a country to its knees and bend it out of perception, as the maxim declares, takes five years, however the state of Britain as a whole can be seen to straddle and cling to its past overt the course of several centuries, but it is in the last eighty years that the melody and tone that we have seen variation in pitch and in variation, that the same song and tune keeps coming back into fashion, and with the same terrifying results, that it has become acceptable, across all age groups, across all sections of society, to descend into the pattern of ugly racism, casual, intentional, institutional xenophobia.
It might only be a whisper, an insidious piece of gossip down the ear of the impressionable and the suggestible, but the words of power are far reaching, the time, intonation and the intention become clear and as the Endeavour episode, Raga, makes clear, one moment of supposed fear, of seeing someone different to you in the street, can bring down a chain of events that result in murder.
Set against the backdrop of the 1970 General election, the imagined threat of a culture war plays out, but it is also one that shows the viewer how murder can be conveniently manipulated when it has an era of suspicion surrounding it.
Raga is an episode that sees Roger Allam once more excel in the role of Fred Thursday, his own view of family and of policing striking a balance against the backlash of a generation sucked into its own disrepair after the hope of the 1960s had all but drained away. The detective’s dogged persistence in the case of the canal path killer is a throwback to the idea of proper policing, of investigation at the deep and murky end and in Roger Allam’s performance that sense of deeply private but passionate for the truth gumshoe becomes the voice a familiar authority which has been much missed, on television and on the unforgiving streets of real life.
A deeply satisfying episode, one that book ends the nation’s diverse views on culture and what it means to be British, what it means to be subjected to the brutality and insidious nature of prevailing racism; Raga is pitched perfectly in tone and meaning.
Ian D. Hall