Photograph: Werner Schmidt

Sunday, September 25, 2011

Hathaway At The Sculls

I like so called detective stories. Unfortunately, I have little time to read any nowadays, but now and then I enjoy watching Masterpiece Mystery on Sundays on the American PBS channel. Being a fan of Inspector Morse, I try to not miss the sequence series Inspector Lewis, which is just wonderful. I think the actors Kevin Whately, who plays Inspector Lewis, and Laurence Fox, who is Lewis’s marvellous side-kick, Detective Sergeant Hathaway, are brilliant.

Just as Inspector Morse was filmed in and around Oxford, so is Inspector Lewis. Quite often when Inspector Morse and his Sergeant Lewis were down by the Isis, a college shell of some kind would pass on the river in the background. I have been waiting for that to happen in Inspector Lewis, too. Well, the other week it actually happened. In the opening scenes of the episode called “Old, Unhappy, Far Off Things” Hathaway was out in a training single wobbling his way on the river while he, with earphones, was listening to a recording where a man’s voice told him to quit smoking. I am not surprised to see Hathaway out on the river plying the sculls as he is a Cambridge man, but I am a little disappointed that he is doing it so poorly. But maybe it is because he is distracted by a women’s college coxed four which rather closely passes him.

If you have not watched this episode, and would like to at least see the beginning, please click here (I am afraid you have to sit through a commercial and Alan Cumming’s introduction before it starts). Take the opportunity to watch it now as this episode will only be available on PBS’s website until 4 October, 2011.

(Photo from PBS website)

2 comments:

  1. I just watched this episode! Do you know the exact name of the kind of scull he was in? I'd love to get one.

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  2. I am afraid I do not know which boat builder has made the single scull in this film. It looks like a little wider shell, so it's probably a practice boat or wherry, not a racing shell. Amongst the famous English builders of wooden boats are Edwin H. Phelps, Carl Douglas, and the boat building family, the Sims. It might be either of these, but I am not sure.

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