WHAT a wonderful journey down memory lane was supplied on Sunday night – for people of my age at least – by the first episode of the new series of Endeavour.

Director Sandra Goldbacher and her team wafted us back with consummate skill to 1967, the Summer of Love during which it was quite apparent that the young Det Con Morse (Shaun Evans) was getting his full share of the loving.

The period detail was uncannily accurate, especially in the clothes and the music, all of which I dimly recognised but was unable to name.

Writer Russell Lewis was clearly inspired in this story by Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby. At its centre was a charismatic young man of enormous wealth – palatial home, fleet of amazing cars, coterie of partying acolytes – whose background was an utter mystery.

Four years before, nobody had heard of Joss Bixby whose name recalled Fitzgerald’s Jay Gatsby.

Into this privileged world, courtesy of old Oxford University connections, came Morse rather as Nick Carraway did in the American classic.

The police hunt, from which Morse was initially excluded, was for the killer of a young bus conductress – remember them? – who disappeared from the ghost train at a visiting fair.

I cannot have been the only viewer to have found the denouement unconvincing. That the unravelling of the plot required 10 minutes of explanation by Morse and his boss Fred Thursday (the superb Roger Allam) says all that is needed about its convolutions.

Nor, I suspect, was I the only viewer curious about the identity of the lovely houses featured. Enquiries of the ITV press office gave me the answers.

Bixby’s lavish pad was Waddesdon Manor, which I ought to have recognised, while that across the lake, belonging to his love rival Lord Belborough, was Minley Manor, Hampshire.