The Fifth Estate

An investigative journalist called Roger Boshier prints details of a royal conversation, supposedly from a tape leaked out of GCHQ. Then the tape goes missing from his desk after a visit from Special Branch, and Clark is asked to find out whether the state stole it. It's a lovely clean conspiracy for about twenty minutes. But then Angela Berridge tells him the tape never existed, and her GCHQ contact confirms it.

From there the episode turns into a demolition job. Mo Connell discovers MI5 has a plant inside the newspaper office, gets him to dig through Boshier's files, and finds the whole story was fabricated, down to the £20,000 Boshier claimed for a tape that was never made. Mo then does something properly Machiavellian: she persuades Boshier to use his column to print material that discredits the local Chief Constable and helps A.C.C. Jan Lewis's campaign for social and sexual justice. The journalist who traded in lies becomes a tool of the very machinery he claimed to expose.

Rob Heyland wrote it, Peter Smith directed, and the guest cast is a treat. Michael Kitchen, later the great detective of Foyle's War, is Boshier. Colin Salmon, years before he stood behind a desk in the Bond films, is Eric Hutchisson. Francesca Annis's Berridge continues to be the series' most useful civil servant. Bernard Hill, still a few years from Titanic, plays Chief Constable Harmsworth, and the accusations reach close to home: Connell's friend Kate Roberts, Barbara Wilshere, is caught up in the affair.

It's a story about truth in public life, and it doesn't flatter anyone. The press fabricates, the state manipulates, and the truth is whatever the most powerful person in the room wants it to be. It's also a rare episode where Connell drives the plot, and Siobhan Redmond takes the opportunity with both hands. The newspaper office scenes, all phones and deadlines and half-truths, give the story a setting most police shows never touch.