LEWIS REMEMBERS (Yorkshire Post, February 16, 2007).

Five years after he was last seen as Robbie Lewis, a role which occupied him in 33 Inspector Morse films for 14 years, Kevin Whately returns to the role.

John Thaw and Kevin made their farewell appearance as Britain's favourite detective duo in November 2000 in the dramatisation of Colin Dexter's final novel The Remorseful Day, in which Morse collapsed in an Oxford college quad and later died in hospital.

A new two-hour film takes up the story again with Lewis - now an Inspector - returning to the Thames Valley police and his stomping ground of the university city of Oxford. Back in the UK from a two-year attachment on the British Virgin Islands, Lewis finds himself teamed up with a much younger colleague and reporting to a female boss in the figure of Chief Supt Jean Innocent as he investigates the murder of an American college student.

Was it a hard job to convince Kevin Whately to take the job? "Various, different people had talked about it; it had been suggested for years and I had pooh-poohed it. It wasn't until Ted Childs (executive producer) actually said, 'How about this?', that I thought seriously about it.

"I have huge respect for Ted and the idea had come originally from ITV drama executive producers Michele Buck and Damien Timmer, who I knew well from Peak Practice days; so the fact I knew all of them and the producer, Chris Burt, and trusted them, was a big factor.

"With the sheer number of detectives on TV, you are constantly being offered new cop roles, several a year. But when this came up, you think, 'There's a back story and people like the Lewis character', so you've got a head start.

"The Morse films had a quality to them which is maybe unusual these days, and Michele Buck promised me it would have the same production values, which made a huge difference. And Madelaine, my wife, said, 'Have a go at it, why not?'"

But Lewis as an inspector has a long history in the annals of the Morse films. "The idea of Lewis being an inspector goes way back to Geoff Case's script for Who Killed Harry Field? in 1991; the subsidiary story throughout that film was 'Could Lewis be an inspector?' and Morse saying 'No, I don't think so,' when actually Morse knew fine well that he could, but he didn't want to lose him.

"If Lewis hadn't got his promotion, he probably would have gone off into private security or one of those jobs, like a lot of police officers do. But it's very obvious in this film that, like Morse, he loves investigating murders and being at the sharp end of police work. "

"It is quite a fiendish plot, and I love the fact that maths are involved; that's quite Morseian." But Kevin admits that he ignored the fact that he was playing the eponymous role. "It never occurred to me, so my shoulders weren't weighed down. We were working at such a speed. It did seem a slightly more frenetic pace than used to be on Morse, maybe just because I had much more to do. So I didn't have time to think, 'Oh God, I wish John was taking the weight!"'

Laurence Fox joins Kevin and plays Cambridge graduate Det Sgt James Hathaway. Kevin explains: "Hathaway is a hugely bright young cop, the sort of graduate policeman that Lewis wouldn't like very much, and obviously he has a hot line to the superintendent and seems to be her man. So he doesn't trust him from that point of view.

"But gradually, and I think quite subtly, over the length of the film, they gain a mutual respect. It sounds like a bit of a cliché, but I think it's well done.

"I think there's a lot of potential there. Both Lewis and Hathaway are nice people; I think we'd have to ginger it up for the future. I think it works fine in this story because there is a bit of grit in the relationship."

After his five-year absence, Lewis finds himself in a new world where women are in the police hierarchy.

"Morse never quite related to women as human beings; he tended either. to fall in love with them or stick them in prison because they were murderesses - or both. But Lewis has always seemed absolutely relaxed and fine with women," says Kevin.

Though it was back in front of the cameras in Oxford for the first time since he and many of the crew filmed The Remorseful Day, Kevin had visited the university city in the intervening years. "I fronted the Magdalen Bridge restoration appeal a few years ago, and have been involved with a few other Oxford charities, including a children's home north of the city."

And of the main college location for the new film, he adds: "We hadn't really done much in Wadham College in the past films; there's still quite a lot of Oxford that we haven't shot in - or that didn't invite us.

"This time they let us have our location base right in the middle of the city by the Radcliffe Camera, which we used to do on the very early Morses before they banished us down to the station yard.

"But Oxford is good to shoot in because wherever you point a camera looks great, and the light is always nice because of the Cotswold stone. "I asked very early on if we could get as many of the core team people; most of them are pals and they are the best. They were always the top people on Morse." In contrast to Hathaway, Lewis can be seen as old- fashioned when it comes to new technology, something with which Kevin can sympathise. "Sending emails from your hand, as Hathaway does, really astonishes me," he says.

"I can't stand people being able to get hold of me at the drop of a hat. I guess I am a bit of a technophobe; things like computers tend to go wrong and if you can't fix them, then you spend your whole life waiting for somebody to come and sort you out. I've got by very happily for 50-plus years without. I don't need it. I don't want it."

How about being reunited with Lewis's creator Colin Dexter? "That was absolutely great, as long as he doesn't open his mouth," he says jokingly. "No, it was fab; he was on the set a lot when we were in Oxford and you could tell it was just such a buzz for him to be back."

How many takes did Kevin do in his scene with Colin as a college scout? "Quite a lot and I can't remember why. It's got to have been Colin's fault and if it wasn't, I am saying that it was; especially if it was my fault!"

Kevin owes his role as Lewis to an out-of-town theatrical flop. After the success of the series Auf Wiedersehen Pet, Kevin met John Thaw to read for the part, though he thought he wouldn't be able to take part in the new detective drama. Kevin recalls how relaxed he was at the meeting with the first producer, Kenny McBain and casting director Michelle Guish, to discuss playing Robbie Lewis. "I thought I wouldn't be able to appear in Morse anyway, because at the time I was out of town in a comedy directed by Ray Cooney.

"We thought it would come into the West End for a long run - but luckily it flopped in somewhere like Hornchurch or Bromley and left me free to be Lewis. I've always liked the character, so now we'll see how the audience react."

John Thaw died in February 2002 at the age of 60. After 13 novels, Colin Dexter said goodbye to Morse and Lewis as he wrote the final novel, The Remorseful Day, published in 1999, but Dexter was delighted to see his creation back in Oxford. The author was a daily visitor to the set and he reprised his Hitchcockian role, familiar from many Morse films, by appearing as a bowler-hatted college scout who shows Lewis and Hathaway to the rooms of Danny Griffon in a scene filmed at Wadham College.

"I think that, above all, what the audience wants, apart from dear old Kevin, is a good story," says Colin, "and I'm confident about this. There are always people who say you should never regurgitate the past. I think the difficulty from the start was whether or not it would be wise to resurrect anything.

"But it seems to me that the joy of this is that we have the continuity from Inspector Morse, not only with Kevin, but with Oxford; and, above all, the wonderful camaraderie of the crew, who seem to be working together in exactly the same ways as in the balmy days of the 33 Morse films."