Murder is murder. You stop believing that, and we might as well not be fighting the war.”
Not long ago, I was watching Foyle’s War, and my wife derided it as “an old people’s programme.” I was indignantly making my case that actually, no it isn’t thank you very much, when I was brutally undermined by an unfortunately timed ad break, where the sponsor proudly announced itself as one of the nation’s best-selling walk-in baths.
Watching it on ITV4 (the cosiest of the freeview channels), where it resided for years in a Sunday afternoon slot, among endless reruns of Agatha Christie’s Poirot and Miss Marple, it’s easy to see why the show has acquired a reputation for being comfort television, especially since any nasty moments were edited out with ITV’s characteristic lack of finesse. Period costumes, polite dialogue, a softly spoken detective solving murders in a picturesque coastal setting – it all feels so familiar. However, now that the series is available on Netflix and mercifully uncensored, it’s easier to see that this reputation is wildly misleading. Beneath the polite manners, plummy British accents and idyllic rural setting lies one of the most interesting and morally layered procedural dramas that British television has ever produced.
Set on the Home Front during the Second World War, the series follows Detective Chief Superintendent Christopher Foyle, played with remarkable restraint by Michael Kitchen. Based in Hastings, Foyle spends the war investigating a frankly alarming number of murders, as well as wartime crimes such as sedition, profiteering, and collaborating with the enemy. Along the way, he is helped and hindered by his guileless driver, Sam Stewart (Honeysuckle Weeks), who is assigned to him in the first episode and is the only character, aside from Foyle, who appears in every episode. Also accompanying them are Sergeant Paul Milner (Anthony Howell), an injured soldier recruited into the police after losing a leg in combat, and Foyle’s son, Andrew (Julian Ovenden), a cocksure pilot in the RAF.
What makes Foyle’s War stand out is the historical setting, and the ambiguous morality that surfaces in almost every episode. There’s rarely the moral clarity of something like Midsomer Murders or Death In Paradise, where the story just resets at the end of every episode. The show’s creator, Anthony Horowitz, already had experience in television crime drama, having written several episodes of Midsomer Murders and Poirot as well as creating the similarly under-appreciated anthology series Murder in Mind. But what sets Foyle’s War apart from its peers is the way it uses its historical setting to tell unique stories. From the start, Horowitz was clear in his approach, as he put it himself: “I was very keen to see if the detective genre could be used to write about something more general than its own inward world of murder. If you put the detective series against something major like the Second World War, you then have a very interesting balance where the murder becomes almost the least interesting thing going on.” This approach gave Horowitz license to explore real historical events and aspects of life during wartime and weave these into his stories as vital background context for the mysteries themselves.
Much of this historical context is well known now, such as Dunkirk, the Battle of Britain, and the development of the bouncing bomb, but many episodes examine the darker, more uncomfortable side of wartime Britain, such as the British fascists, chemical testing, xenophobia, and the abhorrent treatment of conscientious objectors. The crimes in Hastings rarely arise from simple greed or jealousy. Instead, they grow out of the pressures of wartime Britain, be it the black market, profiteering, refugee paranoia, or outright treason.
For a supposedly gentle series, it can also be remarkably brutal. The very first murder, by piano wire stretched between two trees, sets the tone for the rest of the series nicely, but the deaths are never sensational or silly. A young evacuee is blown up in one story; in another a factory accident turns fatal; elsewhere a suspect is brutally tortured. It never feels like Midsomer Murders where the deaths are almost treated as a joke. The murders are given the gravity they deserve, and no-one takes them more seriously than Foyle himself. Justice is often imperfect, or worse, obstructed by the government, and more than once Foyle is asked to compromise his moral code for the sake of the war effort, allowing guilty people to go free, even when they have perpetrated a terrible crime. In many ways, the show is less a conventional whodunnit than a moral drama masquerading as a murder mystery.
Of course it helps that Michael Kitchen gives the best detective performance in British television this side of John Thaw’s Inspector Morse. His Foyle is taciturn, quietly obstinate, and singularly unimpressed by the various pompous authority figures who obstruct and undermine him at every turn – played by the likes of Edward Fox, Corin Redgrave and Michael Jayston. Kitchen underplays his role beautifully, rarely raising his voice and often conveying more with a glance than a speech. The episode rarely delves into his personal life or his deceased wife, but when it does, in episodes like Fifty Ships, or especially The Hide, Kitchen plays his moments of vulnerability perfectly. His interactions with Andrew Scott in The Hide are the definition of showing not telling, with both actors delivering subtle, delicate performances. One utterly devastating moment comes down to Kichen’s understated delivery of the line: “I knew her.” It’s a beautifully observed performance from start to finish. What makes him such an interesting character is in his reluctance to actually perform his duties as a law enforcement officer during the war – in his very first scene, he is shown asking for a transfer where he can help the war effort. It’s a view shared by Horowitz himself, who was fascinated by the idea of “murder stories at a time where murder is devalued” because, really, who is interested in murder when hundreds of men are dying every day. This is especially evident in the very first episode, The German Woman, where Foyle must solve the murder of a magistrate’s German wife, to the interest of absolutely no one. Because of his own inability to actively participate in the war, Foyle is a slightly reluctant hero, bringing an experienced and knowing eye to what are on the face of it mundane local crimes, at a time when murder is almost irrelevant. In doing so, the series conveys a sense of day-to-day realism often missed in portrayals of Britain’s finest hour.
Despite this, writer Anthony Horowitz and Kitchen are careful not to let Foyle become too idealised. He is a good man, and has fairly progressive views, but he remains very much a product of his time: rigidly moral, occasionally judgmental, and sometimes emotionally distant. When he suspects Sam of impropriety, he becomes cold and disapproving, even though it is clearly none of his business. His moral certainty is an admirable trait, but it isolates him and alienates him from the higher authorities. He’s a nuanced but uncompromising character that feels entirely appropriate for the time.
His allies are hardly flawless either. Milner, initially introduced as a decorated war hero, briefly falls under the influence of fascist sympathisers early in the series, and later, after earning a promotion, also earns a dressing down from Foyle for being dismissive of him and Sam. Andrew, meanwhile, manages to entangle himself in more than one murder investigation, much to his father’s exasperation. Julian Ovenden is pretty great as Andrew, at least when he’s not reciting his interminable poetry. He gets the balance just right between arrogance and vulnerability – especially in the scenes depicting his fear of returning to his squadron, and he and Kitchen share a convincing father/son dynamic, with Foyle often quietly despairing of his son’s recklessness. In one episode, during an air raid, the two men take shelter together in an underground basement, only for Foyle to calmly ask: “Why have you brought us to shelter in a fuel dump, Andrew?” All of this contributes to a refreshing take on these types of series, where these imperfections help make the characters more human.
Sam Stewart, meanwhile, is often the element that leads viewers to dismiss the show as twee. Based loosely on Horowitz’s own childhood nanny, Sam is plucky, endlessly optimistic, impeccably well-spoken and occasionally naive. Honeysuckle Weeks plays her with enormous charm, but the character’s cheerful enthusiasm – and habit of saying things like “gosh” and “good show” – can give the impression that the series is more nostalgic than it really is. Where some might call it twee, I would say it’s more a fair representation of how people spoke back then, indeed the whole lifestyle of the time. Sam is effectively the embodiment of the “Britain can take it” attitude propagated by the government at the time, and constantly has her optimism challenged by the often brutal murderers she is confronted with over the course of the series.
The show is also blessed with an extraordinary parade of guest stars. Established actors like Roger Allam, Anton Lesser, Robert Hardy, Charles Dance and Peter Capaldi appear alongside a veritable who’s who of future stars such as Rosamund Pike, David Tennant, Andrew Scott, Emily Blunt, James McAvoy, and Danny Dyer, all on the brink of stardom.
At its best, the series challenged preconceived notions of life during the war, while still acknowledging moments of genuine heroism. The White Feather might be the best example of this, contrasting the very best of British wartime attitudes with the very worst, balancing the rise of the blackshirts and anti-semitism with the extraordinary civilian rescue effort at Dunkirk. The episode contrasts moments of remarkable poignant humanity (the scene with the fisherman and his son is one of the most moving scenes the series ever accomplished) with some dialogue that remains deeply shocking, as the apparently civilised Friday club show their true colours, enjoying a jokey Noel Coward-esque antisemitic song. It’s repellent, and still shocking today, but the episode as a whole demonstrates Horowitz’s even-handed approach. As the leader of the Friday Club, Charles Dance’s performance as the leader of the Friday Club is for the most part, fairly warm – there’s a reason Milner is persuaded by him after all – but then there’s that line where he pointedly asks Foyle if he’s Jewish, only to get a withering look in response. He’s an incredibly reptilian villain, whether he’s a murderer or not.
Elsewhere, Horowitz tends to reserve judgment – there are a few episodes where the ending is a little ambiguous, and one where Foyle literally asks “What would you have done?” Horowitz loves this moral ambiguity, weighing up the worth of one life compared to millions, or the merits of prosecuting war heroes, those on the front line, or influential figures, when it could negatively impact the war effort. There are plenty of episodes that show sympathy, or at least compassion, for characters breaking the law. Robert Hardy’s judge in the first episode, the German paratrooper in Fifty Ships – it rarely comes down to British good, Germans bad. Generally speaking, though, when the mystery is lacking, there will be something interesting going on in the subtext of the episode, and vice versa. The mystery in Among The Few, for instance, is pretty obvious, but this is compensated through the compelling petrol theft subplot. Similarly, the murder mystery at the centre of Casualties Of War is a little lacklustre, but it remains one of my favourite episodes because of Foyle himself reaching breaking point, and the bouncing bomb subplot.
If one episode captures the show firing on all cylinders, it’s The Funk Hole. The title refers to a wartime slang term for a place where wealthy civilians could retreat to avoid the worst of the bombing while the rest of the country endured the Blitz. When a murder occurs in one such refuge, Foyle is unable to investigate personally, hamstrung by Whitehall red tape, suspended from duty and confined to his home, forced to rely on Milner and Andrew to investigate on his behalf, while he puts the pieces together from the sidelines. For my money, this episode has everything the series excelled at – the structure is one of the strongest of the series, and the mystery is a genuine headscratcher, with a murderer who is among the more sympathetic in the series. On top of which are the subplots about rationing and the London bombing. It’s both an excellent mystery and a quietly devastating look at wartime inequality.
After the series’ initial cancellation in 2007, Horowitz was forced to rush the story forward to 1945 and the end of the war. After an upswell of audience feedback, the show was revived a couple of years later, (One of the rare examples where audience pressure resurrected prestige television) but the fraught production history meant that several wartime stories had to be abandoned, and Horowitz had to come up with a new angle in post-war Britain. Foyle moved into the world of intelligence work, joining MI5 and dealing with the murkier politics of the early Cold War. These stories introduced a new supporting cast of spies rather than policemen, and Foyle found himself more disillusioned than ever.
I think it’s fair to say the wartime stories are where the series really shines, but there are some excellent later stories too. The main difference is the tone – in the wartime episodes, as dark as they get, there’s a constant throughline of the forbearance and resilience of the British populace. A country enduring hardship together, united against a common enemy.
It’s ironic, then, that the end of the war ushers in a far murkier moral landscape. In episodes like Sunflower and Elise, the enemies are less visible, and far more insidious. Foyle finds himself increasingly at odds with his superiors, who operate with a fluid, pragmatic morality – protecting former enemies, burying inconvenient truths, and prioritising stability over justice. The move to London reinforces this shift: the bright coastal optimism of Hastings gives way to something greyer and more cynical, where the Dunkirk spirit and has evaporated and been replaced with bitter cynicism. The series is much less warm, less morally clear-cut, and even Sam’s irrepressible optimism seems strained. As one character puts it, “We won the war but lost everything else.”
In the first retrospective I wrote for this site, I dismissed Foyle’s War as cosy viewing. It’s not an opinion that I now hold. The genius of the series is that it looks like comfort television while quietly dismantling comforting myths about the war itself. It isn’t really a teatime mystery about wartime England at all, but rather a drama about what war does to morality, and a detective stubbornly trying to hold on to the idea that right and wrong still mean something. Hopefully its presence on Netflix will lead to more people discovering just how good it really is.
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