CHARLES WILLIAMS IS ON BRITISH TELEVISION–AND SO IS THIS BLOG.
Do you watch Inspector Lewis? If you do, yay! If not, now is the time to start, because…
Now is the time of Charles Williams!
- Grevel Lindop’s biography, Charles Williams: The Third Inkling, will be released in just a few days
- My book The Inklings and King Arthur should appear early next year (d.v. — and if I even take enough time away from blogging and running this creative writing contest to make the bibliographies and index!)
- And there’s a two-episode story about Charles Williams on Inspector Lewis running tonight and next Tuesday!
Inspector Lewis is a brilliant British detective show set in Oxford. It is a spin-off from the earlier series Inspector Morse. In it, Detective Inspector Lewis (played by Kevin Whately) and his (hot) young sergeant James Hathaway (played by Laurence Fox) solve horrific murders committed just beneath Oxford’s suave surface. It’s total eye-candy and brain-candy for someone in love with Oxford, cute British guys, and nerdy literary allusions. And it’s really top-notch acting and perfect TV-show-making. Do watch it!
The British television network ITV contacted me this summer to get my permission to use print-outs of The Oddest Inkling on their show.
Season Nine has just begun; starting tonight, the two-episode story “Magnum Opus” will air in the UK. (I’m still working on how to see it in the US — it’s supposed to be on Masterpiece Mystery, but their webpage is not up to date). In this story, a murder occurs after some academics get in a pub fight while debating about Charles Williams. Alchemical and occult symbols serve as clues at the crime scene. The murder victims are members of a secret esoteric society that apparently believes in a twisted version of Charles Williams’s own “co-inherence”: they think they can literally share one another’s guilt for some crime in the past.
It will be creepy — but of course! It’s about CW! So keep your eyes peeled. If you live in the UK, you should be able to watch it here at some point soon. I’ll let you know when and how to watch it (legally) in the US — or you let me know!
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Here is a review of Magnum Opus by Hannah Long: http://longish95.blogspot.com/2015/10/inspector-lewis-magnum-opus-review.html.
Here is a fascinating blog post on Oxford Dictionaries that records the word “alchemy” surging to the most-searched word the week after the episode aired! http://blog.oxforddictionaries.com/2015/10/magnum-opus-origin/
The Oddest Inkling 
Wow! Fascinating – and, congratulations!
If all else fails, I assume it will (eventually) be released on disk. The British Season 8 – which is apparently the equivalent of U.S. Season 7 – was broadcast in 2014 and it looks like the dvds/Blu-ray came out almost immediately.
Meanwhile, I see there is a tantalizing snippet on the ITV website (unless regional issues make it inaccessible?).
Do you know the Inspector Morse (Mozartian) “Masonic Mysteries” episode from 1990? I’m not sure where it is on the possible-probable scale, but I really like it.
As someone in love with Oxford, do you ever do things like try to see where they’re driving by watching the background, or figure out which bits of real places they’ve spliced together when they create a fictional college? – on rewatching, of course: it could be dangerously distracting from following the plot.
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Yeah, I can buy the episodes later, but I want to watch them tonight! I haven’t found any (legal) way to do so. 😦 And I’m even talking to production to ask them to hook me up with the files. Sad story.
I don’t have time for rewatching! I’ve only even seen the first 3 seasons. Gotta get back to editing…
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Having worked together on the show, ITV might have been forthcoming with a little facilitation well in advance…
Well, you’ve got around an hour-and-a-half to go, unless my time zones are scrambled… Good luck!
I think I may have seen every Morse at least once, but I may be wrong even in that – I’m certainly not caught up with Lewis at all (and regularly surprised at discovering what my options are and aren’t in the viewing world).
A Cranmerian initiation, above (not quoting the play, and with gloves more forensic than traditionally ritual)?
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Get a ‘night elf’ edition now (I know you have their card) and still buy it later. Everybody wins. But that is still kind of cutting in line isn’t it. But like Raskolnikov said, extraordinary men are not bound by the same rules as ordinary men. At any rate, I doubt you are going to make yourself wait.
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I’m giving the production team time to get back to me about giving me access to the file!
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Awesome! And congratulations! 😀
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Congratulations, Sørina, you and CW have hit the big time. It will be interesting to see how many people come looking for this blog, wondering if what they saw on the show was real. (Given how many people seem to think “The Martian” is based on a true story, probably quite a few.) “Lewis” is a nice show. Hathaway, as it happens, is no longer Lewis’ sergeant, having been promoted. How that affects his place on the hotness scale I will leave to you to decide. But, in a bit of Dr Who related trivia, Laurence Fox is the husband of Billie Piper.
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Haha, well, I don’t think Laurence Fox will have lost his foxy appeal just because he got a raise! Clearly I need to catch up on the show. (But see my previous post about poor library access). Oh, yes, I knew about the marriage to Billie Piper: speaking of hot Brits, guess who was at the wedding, and what he was wearing? http://tinyurl.com/pwewtw5
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And there I was, hoping it was Amy Pond.
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Haha! I don’t blame you. Maybe she was there, too.
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very cool! congratulations!
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Thanks!
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Congrats, Sørina! That’s so exciting! I went all over PBS’s website trying to find out when these episodes air in the States and I couldn’t find anything, but I did find out that Masterpiece Mystery just wrapped up their seventh season last night, so the eighth season (the one which “Magnum Opus” is a part of) shouldn’t be too far off! 🙂
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The numbering is super weird. It’s season 9 in the UK. Maybe we skipped one here?
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I found one site that claims that (for some reason) two of the earlier seasons were run together when they aired in the US, so now the numbering is off.
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This is awesome! Also, I would be very interested in your book on the Inklings and King Arthur! *sideways glance at own Inklings-inspired Arthurian novel*
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Give us the link! Don’t be shy!
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Haha! Sure!
Pendragon’s Heir
And, shout out to David Llewellyn Dodds for helping me with sorting out copyright issues for the epigraphs. Sadly, I was 12 months too early to use any Williams quotes 😦
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And it’s only $2.99 on Kindle!
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I’ve just watched the Lewis show – which was a bizarre experience. I just kept thinking how strange it was to have these people discussing Charles Williams in a modern play… I could barely concentrate on what was happening (and when I did, I could barely follow it). Lots of seedy people telling lies to policemen…
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Sounds about right… Worth another viewing?
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@Sorina – “Worth another viewing?” I don’t usually watch Lewis (an example of what I term ‘the higher hokum’), so probably not – I am just watching for the CW.
The CW referencing is a mixture between mostly very detailed and accurate; and bits that are completely wrong/ made up/ the opposite of what CW said – which will presumably turn-out to be necessary for the plot.
There is a lot about tattoos! – which are (very unfortunately) a major part of modern British life, but seem very alien to the world of CW.
The main point is that I wouldn’t have wanted to miss it – and neither will you!
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ITV is sending me a dvd! yay!
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Hi there. If you email me at britdetectives at gmail I can send you tonight’s episode! Might take me ’til Wednesday morning though
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ITV is sending me a dvd! yay!
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It’ll be fun to see how you and The Oddest Inkling appear – do consider giving us an update when the dvd arrives!
I was somehow reminded about how Alfred Hitchcock sneaked his playful signature appearance into Lifeboat – by way of a newspaper photo!
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Congrats! How cool is that?!
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Thanks!!
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