The Professionals · S03E07
Runner
First broadcast 1979-12-08 · Michael Kitchen as Duffy
Kitchen's genre debut here is a long way from Foyle. Duffy is a terrorist with a personal grudge: he stages a raid on a gun shop that turns out to be full of junk, the first clue that the real plan is to wreck the truce his own organisation has just agreed with CI5, and then lures Doyle into a car-park bomb trap to settle a family score. It is an early demonstration of the thing Foyle would later use for decency — a man whose quiet reads as control — pointed entirely at mayhem.
Minder · S07E05
Fiddler on the Hoof
First broadcast 1989-01-30 · Michael Kitchen as Maltese Tony
A safety deposit bank in the City is robbed and Arthur Daley's box survives, so he does the sensible daft thing: he moves his money to a lock-up guarded by Terry and very little else. Then he is caught on television greeting an old friend, and the greeting is the trouble — Maltese Tony is wanted by a local gang boss. Kitchen plays Tony with the easy charm of a man who has no idea what he has just cost Arthur's doorstep, a comic turn done completely straight.
Lovejoy · S03E10
Kids
First broadcast 1992-03-15 · Michael Kitchen as David Herbert
Ian McShane's most paternal hour of the season: Lovejoy's daughter Vicky announces she is living with an older man whose wife, he says, has died. Lovejoy looks into it and finds the wife very much unaccounted for, which turns paternal disapproval into something more urgent. Kitchen is David Herbert, the gentleman in question, playing him as unbothered, elegant and hiding in plain sight — composed guest villainy of exactly the sort the series did well.
Inspector Morse · S06E03
The Death of the Self
First broadcast 1992-03-25 · Michael Kitchen as Russell Clarke
An English tourist is found dead at an Italian holiday resort, the local authorities are content to call it an accident, and the inquest the family prompts slides into a smuggling ring moving antiquities out of the country under cover of tourism. Kitchen is Russell Clarke, one of the moneyed English circle around the dead woman, giving the part the brittle, expensive tension it wants opposite Frances Barber's opera singer and Georges Corraface's Italian fixer. One of Morse's most relaxed and good-humoured entries, and Clarke is one of the reasons the world feels inhabited.
Between the Lines · S02E07
The Fifth Estate
First broadcast 1993-11-16 · Michael Kitchen as Roger Boshier
A journalist prints details of a royal conversation supposedly leaked from GCHQ, the tape vanishes from his desk after a Special Branch visit, and Tony Clark is asked whether the state stole it. It is a lovely clean conspiracy for about twenty minutes. Kitchen is Roger Boshier, the journalist, and the episode spends its second half demolishing him: the tape never existed, the story was fabricated down to the £20,000 he claimed for it. A perfectly pitched turn as a man whose scoop is a fraud.
Pie in the Sky · S01E01
The Best of Both Worlds
First broadcast 1994-03-13 · Michael Kitchen as Dudley Hooperman
The founding antagonist of Pie in the Sky. Kitchen plays Dudley Hooperman, the high-class thief whose escape opens the series and whose apparent murder gets Henry Crabbe arrested on the eve of his restaurant launch. The charge does not survive, but the consequences do: Hooperman shot Crabbe in the leg, and Assistant Chief Constable Fisher's hold over Crabbe — keep the restaurant, keep taking the cases — is built on him. He is the reason the series' detective never quite gets to retire.
Pie in the Sky · S03E01
Money Talks
First broadcast 1995-12-31 · Michael Kitchen as Dudley Hooperman
Hooperman's last word in the show is a piece of news: word reaches Crabbe that the man who shot him in the leg and anchored Fisher's blackmail since the pilot is dead. With Hooperman gone there is no case for Fisher to reopen, and retirement flickers back into view — until a rule change ties Crabbe to the force for three more years and he does his job too well in a car chase the pizza-gang case hands him. Kitchen's antagonist ends as he was always played, from a distance, rearranging other people's lives.
A Touch of Frost · S04E04
The Things We Do for Love
First broadcast 1996-01-28 · Michael Kitchen as Jonathan Meyerbridge
A local physiotherapist is found stabbed in a car park and the investigation circles the respectable surface of Denton's religious community before finding the rot underneath. Kitchen is Jonathan Meyerbridge, its leading figure — an arrest for assault in his past, love letters from the victim in his present, secret rendezvous above a follower's butcher's shop, and a defence orchestrated by Edward Gull. The casting is the point: the man who would later play Foyle as patience and decency here plays certainty, and the rot beneath it.
Dalziel and Pascoe · S03E03
Bones and Silence
First broadcast 1998-10-18 · Michael Kitchen as Philip Swain
Dalziel witnesses a shooting through his own window: a woman dead, her husband Philip Swain and her lover both insisting they were trying to stop her killing herself, and Dalziel — drunk, certain he saw Swain holding the gun — refusing to let it go while Pascoe worries aloud about his judgement. Kitchen plays Swain as the respectable face the whole episode interrogates, in one of the series' best-constructed hours, running alongside a cathedral mystery play that casts Dalziel as God.