Amaze your friends with these dinner table titbits about Oxford's favourite sleuth

**Most people know Colin Dexter has cameo roles, Hitchcock-style, in the televised versions of his detective's adventures. But when he played a tramp in Happy Families, filmed from the top of the Carfax tower, a real down-and-out approached him, grabbed his 'meths' and ran off - only to find it was water.

**Morse shares his birthday with Dexter - September 29, 1930 - making the detective 70 this year. John Thaw is 12 years younger.

**Morse originally drove a Lancia in Dexter's early novels. He changed his mode of transport to a Jaguar after the television Morse started to drive one.

**In September 1999, Brakspear's Brewery in Henley brought out a new beer - Morse's Bitter Endeavour - to mark the end of the detective. The brewery was used as a setting for a fictitious brewery in The Sins Of The Father.

**After saying goodbye to Oxford in March, many of the Morse crew - including John Thaw, producer Chris Burt and director Jack Gold - returned in the summer for a day's filming on a special episode of Kavanagh QC.

**Before the first Morse film, The Dead Of Jericho, hit the screens, television bosses were worried a two-hour detective drama wouldn't interest an ITV audience.

**Morse has a global audience of one billion people in 200 countries, ranging from Canada to Mongolia, Malawi to Nepal, El Salvador to Papua New Guinea.