I look to be having stay-at-home weekends for the next few weeks, with Richard Wagner’s Ring cycle live from New York’s Metropolitan Opera courtesy of Radio 3 on Saturday nights and the excellent new Morse prequel Endeavour going out from ITV on Sundays.

This week’s first episode, scripted by Russell Lewis, made hugely entertaining viewing even if — as with Morse and Lewis — the twists and turns of the plot were almost impossible to follow.

Shaun Evans supplied a convincing portrait of the curmudgeonly detective at the dawn of his sleuthing career in Oxford, though Roger Allam recognisably wrested the acting honours as the good-natured Det Insp Fred Thursday. (Is his name a nod in the direction of G.K. Chesterton’s The Man Who Was Thursday?) I couldn’t get over Allam’s resemblance to the late Sir Kingsley Amis. Should anybody ever be required to portray the Garrick Club stalwart, then here is the man.

Endeavour’s period verisimilitude was greatly assisted by much of the action taking place behind a thick curtain of cigarette smoke. It was entertaining to be reminded (through a fag packet being used for a cache of drugs) of the existence of Player’s Weights, which used to be smoked in industrial quantity by my old colleague John O’Callaghan.

It was surely a mistake, though, to have young Morse puffing away on a Park Drive. A man of such obvious good taste, and already owner of a lovely Jaguar car, would have chosen a far more upmarket brand.