YIPEE! Foyle’s War is back on the telly with a new series of thoughtful nostalgia and crisp plots.
Writer Anthony Horowitz has taken the English wartime police inspector’s role and transplanted him to post-war MI5 and the world of Cold War espionage.
Michael Kitchen is back as the enigmatic and wonderfully under-stated policeman of the title and Honeysuckle Weeks returns as his ditzy but effective side-kick, Sam.
Apart from all the attention to period detail and clever writing there is something enjoyably heroic about this series. Many of us are totally unfamiliar with that austere post Second World War world and it’s enlightening to see what grandparents had to live through in a difficult peace-time.
But it’s also a gentler world where old-fashioned values and loyalties are still important, where communication is mostly face-to-face and not by impersonal text or emails, where people seem to matter. Yes, I know it’s only a TV series but it’s such a quintessentially English showcase that it prompts a warm, cosy glow of half-recognition.
Foyle’s War has proved popular around the world and it’s easy to see why. This is the English in our truest, unsullied form – some good, some bad, naturally. But the ethos of a proud nation, irrespective of personal acquisitions, and glorying in being free.