Campaign For Silence

The first series turns literary with "Campaign For Silence", a tale of memoirs, old soldiers and the thirty-year silence around the Korean War. A writer, Stanley Morton, has been helping a retired major, Gerald Furneaux, set down his experiences in captivity — and someone does not want the book published. Morton is struck over the head and robbed of his briefcase; the manuscript, in a hotel room, is being typed in the dead of night. When Bergerac follows the trail to Furneaux, he finds a man whose account of the war could end careers, and whose wife Edith, played by Jane Wenham, would rather the whole thing stayed buried.

Alistair Bell's script gives the hour a melancholy, almost Graham Greene-ish register. Ian Hendry — a hard, charismatic screen presence from the sixties — plays the major with a worn dignity that keeps the audience unsure whether he is a victim or a man protecting a shameful secret of his own. Simon Cadell, best remembered as the theatrical impresario of Hi-de-Hi!, is the writer whose curiosity has put him in harm's way. Around them the cast fills out a world of former servicemen, quiet grudges and long memory, and Martyn Friend, returning after the pilot, directs with the same unhurried patience.

The episode is a thriller built on letters, phone calls and uneasy silences rather than gunfire. The book's contents — references to guns and attack buried in a typewriter ribbon — lead Bergerac toward what actually happened to Furneaux in Korea, and the investigation becomes a race to understand the book before the next name is crossed off. The resolution relies on a confession the writing has to coax rather than earn, and the hour is talkier than its predecessors, but the register suits a series whose detective is at his best picking at the seams of a respectable life.

What lingers is the period atmosphere: early-eighties Jersey, tweed and typed manuscripts, old boys who do not discuss the war. The story is about the things men took to their graves and the ones who would kill to keep them there, and Bergerac — the outsider who refuses to honour the silence — is the right man to open the file. A quiet, effective hour that shows the first series could do restraint as well as spectacle, anchored by two of the finest guest performances of its run.