The Price · S01E01
Episode 1
First broadcast 1985-01-10 · Harriet Walter as Frances Carr
The serial that put her opposite Derek Thompson at the very start of both their screen careers in the genre. Walter is Frances Carr, the wife at the centre of the kidnapping story, who has worked out she married Geoffrey for his money and says so to his face. The episode is shrewd about money as a language — Geoffrey is fluent in it, Frances understands it all too well — and her reaction to his grand gesture, buying back the Irish mansion she grew up in, is not the one he was hoping for.
The Price · S01E03
Episode 3
First broadcast 1985-01-24 · Harriet Walter as Frances Carr
The ransom stands at a precise three million pounds and the episode runs two struggles in parallel, neither going well. Walter's Frances carries the emotional fallout on the family side while the money sits in the room like a third character, suspicion spreading through every interaction — the kind of pressure part that asks for intelligence rather than display, which is precisely what she gives it.
The Price · S01E04
Episode 4
First broadcast 1985-01-31 · Harriet Walter as Frances Carr
The captive now, in the hour where the kidnappers' forced cooperation starts eating through its seams: Kate's paranoia rises, and the episode's sharpest observation is that the people holding Frances are frightened people with guns rather than a disciplined unit. Walter plays the waiting — the knowledge accumulating, the trust souring — while Geoffrey contemplates options that turn increasingly desperate.
The Price · S01E06
Episode 6
First broadcast 1985-02-14 · Harriet Walter as Frances Carr
The endgame: after the fiasco of the drop, Geoffrey abandons the official route and turns vigilante, hunting the kidnappers himself through the network of people connected to the case while the police investigation pulls the other way. Walter's Frances crosses the paths of Thompson's Crossan, Grehan's Kate and Reid's Clare as the two investigations start getting in each other's way.
Inspector Morse · S07E02
The Day of the Devil
First broadcast 1993-01-13 · Harriet Walter as Dr Esther Martin
The series' most pagan hour: a devil-worshipping rapist escapes custody and the calendar moves toward Lammas, the festival of ritual fire on which he has demanded a meeting with the therapist who knew him inside. Walter is Dr Esther Martin, one of two contrasting experts the manhunt leans on — hers the consulting-room knowledge, opposite Richard Griffiths's theatrical occult scholar — in an episode equal parts procedure and horror.
Dalziel and Pascoe · S04E03
Time to Go
First broadcast 1999-06-26 · Harriet Walter as Mary Waddell
A drugs raid on the Tribal Pulse nightclub leaves an eighteen-year-old in a coma, and the toxic screen — MDMA plus something nobody expected — turns the case. Walter is Mary Waddell in the story's orbit of club owners, guardians and dealers, an episode that opens with the raid and follows the amphetamines through every layer of Wetherton's night economy.
Waking the Dead · S01E05
A Simple Sacrifice (1)
First broadcast 2001-07-02 · Harriet Walter as Annie Keel
One of her best television parts of the period: Annie Keel has served half a sentence for two killings, and the whole case against her rested on her own confession — no forensics worth the name, just a woman telling the court she'd done it. Walter plays the question that drives the hour, why Annie said she did, with the terrible sense it makes: to protect someone, to end an interrogation, because she was persuaded she was guilty.
Waking the Dead · S01E06
A Simple Sacrifice (2)
First broadcast 2001-07-03 · Harriet Walter as Annie Keel
An anonymous letter writer demonstrates Annie wasn't the only person present at the murders, keeping Boyd off balance, while the search for her son — a child at the scene twenty-five years ago, now an adult who may not want to be found — is handled with more care than urgency. Walter plays the reopening of the file from the inside: what accumulates is a fuller picture of how little the first investigation wanted to look at what it had.
Midsomer Murders · S08E03
Orchis Fatalis
First broadcast 2005-01-09 · Harriet Walter as Margaret Winstanley
A trail of bodies connected by a shared enthusiasm for rare orchids — even by Midsomer standards an odd one, murders about flowers with Latin names. Walter is Margaret Winstanley, circling the prize blooms with very different ideas about who deserves them, in the damp, watchful world of collectors where a specimen matters more than a friendship.
Messiah · S04E01
The Harrowing (1)
First broadcast 2005-08-28 · Harriet Walter as Professor Robb
The bleakest of the Messiah serials opens with a post-mortem room that has never felt colder, and Walter arrives as Professor Robb, the guide Red eventually needs — helping him move past the what of the crimes to the why, closer to philosophy than procedure. Her three-part arc is the quiet counterweight to a story of deaths staged to mirror the Inferno.
Messiah · S04E02
The Harrowing (2)
First broadcast 2005-08-29 · Harriet Walter as Professor Robb
The murders take a turn for the literary — a student stung to death by bees, lovers found hooked together like meat on a rail — and Red spots the Inferno pattern, which means the killer is heading for an ending. Walter's Robb stays in the margins of the case as DI Jack Price is suspended for pushing the theory nobody wants to hear, the show letting its unusual kind of expert counsel sit rather than rushing past it.
Messiah · S04E03
The Harrowing (3)
First broadcast 2005-08-30 · Harriet Walter as Professor Robb
The revelation arrives the way these things usually do, as a tired realisation in the middle of a long night: Isabel, there the whole time. Walter's Professor Robb steps forward as the guide Red needs at the edge of his sanity, and the episode is honest that understanding, when it comes, is closer to philosophy than forensics — an unusual kind of help for a detective to accept, played with total seriousness.
Agatha Christie's Poirot · S11E02
Cat Among the Pigeons
First broadcast 2008-09-21 · Harriet Walter as Miss Bulstrode
A prestigious girls' school, staff being murdered one after another, and a trove of rubies that arrived via a foreign revolution and a kidnapped princess. Walter is Miss Bulstrode, the headmistress at the centre of the staff and pupil versions of events that do not agree — Christie's safest place in England turned inside out, with James Kent directing.
Midsomer Murders · S15E04
Death and the Divas
First broadcast 2013-01-02 · Harriet Walter as Diana Davenport
A film historian working on a 1960s horror actress is killed, and the deaths that follow are staged like scenes from the actress's old films. Walter is Diana Davenport among the people around the legacy, all with opinions that do not agree about what the films meant — and the copycat detail is a trail rather than decoration, which Barnaby has to decide is tribute or threat.