At 35:00 Nick asks Morse if he reads Huxley, then says 'I want to see what's beyond the door," in a reference to Aldous Huxley's book 'The Doors of Perception', in which the author chronicled his experimentation with mescaline. That book's title is taken from William Blake's poem 'The Marriage of Heaven and Hell': "If the doors of perception were cleansed, everything would appear to man as it is, infinite." The band The Doors, took their name from Huxley's work.
The doctor who looks after the young band has a session with one of them and his advice is lifted from the Beatles song "Tomorrow Never Knows" as he tells him to imagine he is a leaf floating down a stream and says "it is not dying". This scene also alludes to Roger Corman's film "The Trip", released in the US in 1967 (the year this story takes place), but banned in Britain; it is also referenced elsewhere in the episode.
Wildwood's manager mentions that "Rum and Coke is a Wildwood drink", which bears a distinct resemblance to Beatles' manager Brian Epstein's quote from the BBC sessions, "we all celebrated with Rum, Scotch and Coke which was becoming a Beatle drink even then".
The scene between Morse and Dr. DeBryn in the morgue begins in darkness, with the camera inside the long cabinet within which the body is stored. The cabinet is opened by DeBryn and we see the scene initially from the same angle, almost as if the camera were the eyes of the dead man. At the end of the scene, the camera returns to this position as the cabinet is closed, the scene fading to black as it shuts. These shots are virtually identical to the camera positions at the beginning and end of the morgue scene in "Charade" (1963), where the French police call upon Audrey Hepburn's character to identify her murdered husband.
The facial resemblance of the Wildwood's manager Ralph Spender to Brian Epstein, the real-life manager of the Beatles, is most noticeable. Epstein died in the summer of 1967, when this story takes place.
Colin Dexter: photo in upper right-hand corner of newspaper; headline: "Local Man Wins National Crossword Competition."