PUTTIN' ON THE FOYLE, COACH:

Foyle's War, ITV1, review (James Walton, Apr 2010, Daily Telegraph)

ITV famously intended the 2008 series of Foyle’s War to be the last — which is why it ended on VE Day. But that was before a viewers’ revolution as quietly effective as the show itself forced the channel’s senior management to cancel the cancellation.

In which circumstances, it was hard not to detect something gleefully symbolic about an early scene in last night’s comeback episode. Foyle (Michael Kitchen), erstwhile Hasting’s Detective Chief Superintendent, was supposed to have retired from the police, but now the force’s senior management begged him not to leave after all. “You’re a hard act to follow,” they pleaded. “You were very successful.” Eventually, having let them explain just how irreplaceable he’d turned out to be, Foyle agreed to stay on.

And in another piece of good news for fans, Foyle’s War has clearly been allowed to return on its own terms – because, apart from the absence of a war, the programme is defiantly unchanged.