My Father Knew Lloyd Mbotu Terence

Pru Standfast's father, a retired Major General, has made an enemy he never expected to hear from again: the President of a newly independent African country, from the days when the General served in the British army out there. Now a professional killer, Nkobe, has been sent to settle the score. The General refuses protection, so Pru is sent to guard him herself, which means telling her father, for the first time, what she actually does for a living.

It is a lovely, uncomfortable situation for everyone. The General has spent years being proud of his daughter without asking questions, and now the questions are unavoidable. Pru guards a man who doesn't believe he needs guarding, and the two of them negotiate their way through it with all the warmth and awkwardness you would expect from a family that has just discovered it doesn't know itself. There is a particular kind of Britishness to a retired Major General insisting, over lunch, that he doesn't need protecting, while his daughter sizes up the room.

Meanwhile Maggie works a much smaller case for an insurance company and exposes a chair-ridden accident victim as a fraud, which is the episode's way of saying that not every lie is a national security matter.

Terence Feely wrote it and William Brayne directed. Rosalyn Landor's Pru and Frederick Treves' Major General John Standfast carry the family drama, with Faith Brook as Anne Standfast, Tony Armatrading as Nkobe, Robin Sachs as James Latchmere, Bill Ritchie as Mortimer, George Irving as Alan Hewitt and Donald Churchill as Mike Leapman, plus Jill Gascoine's Maggie on the insurance case.

But the two halves never quite meet, and that is fine. The father-daughter thread is the reason to watch, and it earns its ending. It is the rare episode where the personal and the professional turn out to be the same case.