Cross My Palm With Silver

A clairvoyant sends Pru Standfast out to find a place she has never seen: the spot, according to the vision, where Pru is going to die. It is the sort of opening that could go anywhere, and the episode wisely doesn't settle for spooky atmospherics. Pru soon realises she is not the only one looking for this place, and the other searchers are not the sort you would want to meet at the end of a lane.

But the twist is an old one and a good one: the vision is a map. Where the seer sees death, there is actually a pot of gold, and everyone hunting for it has been lying about what they know. The pot of gold is a nice old-fashioned McGuffin, and the show carries it off without blinking. Pru is the only one who gets there honestly, which puts her in the most danger of all.

Jeremy Burnham wrote it and Robert Fuest directed. Rosalyn Landor's Pru is the focus, with Cherith Mellor as Madame Crystal, Ronald Lacey as Quigley, Desmond McNamara as Binks, John Harding as Luis de Ybaluccia, Peter Vaughan as Woodbridge, Lee Walker as Det. Sgt. Armstrong and Edward Anthony as Det. Const. Watts, with Jill Gascoine's Maggie and Leslie Ash's Fred on the edges. Ronald Lacey, familiar to anyone who grew up on Raiders of the Lost Ark, makes Quigley properly unpleasant, which helps. It went out in May 1985, halfway through the first series. Robert Fuest, who directed, was the man behind The Abominable Dr Phibes, and he gives the fortune-teller's parlour a proper movie sheen. The show rarely looks this deliberately strange.

The occult dressing is mostly a trick of the light, and the show knows it. Underneath is a treasure hunt with teeth, and Pru walks through it with her usual quiet competence. Fortune-telling never looked so much like detective work.