Portrait of Yesterday

"Portrait of Yesterday" is the first series at its most Christie-like: a society wedding, a grand house, and a past that will not stay buried. As Felicity Mitchell prepares to marry in the same church where her parents were married, her mother Sarah — played by Sarah Lawson — is haunted by the appearance of a family photograph in a national magazine. A man from the church, Peter Westgate, has been watching the house; a curate has been attacked after investigating a light in the vestry; and two backpackers, Duggie Cowley and Sandi Hardwick, saw a white Mercedes outside the church on the night of the assault. It falls to Bergerac to discover what Sarah is running from.

Dennis Spooner, a veteran who could write almost anything, gives the episode a domestic intimacy that suits the series' quieter register, and Laurence Moody directs with an eye for the social ritual — the dresses, the toasts, the polite distances between relatives — letting the unease grow in the gaps between them. Derek Farr's Laurence Mitchell is the patriarch with something to protect; Charles Kay's Westgate is the man who has returned to claim it. Christopher Villiers, in an early role, plays Cowley, whose sighting gives Bergerac his first thread.

The secret, when it surfaces, is exactly the sort of thing a family would spend decades agreeing never to mention — a crime from Sarah's past, buried by money and silence, that the wedding has dragged into the light. Bergerac, in these contained stories, is less the action man than the patient listener, and the episode trusts the audience to sit with the discomfort of a family secret finally spoken aloud. The resolution is bittersweet rather than triumphant, which feels right.

The hour is gentler than the espionage and murder stories around it, and some viewers will find the pace slow. But that restraint is the point. The most damaging crimes, the series keeps suggesting, are sometimes the ones a household agrees never to name. A thoughtful, elegantly staged entry that shows the range of the first season — capable of the intimate as well as the international — anchored by two generations of careful, melancholy performance.