One Away

Edward Stone is a Soviet spy serving a life sentence in a top security jail, and the episode opens with him getting out of it in a way that earns the word daredevil: posing as an army officer, driving off in a jeep, and trusting that nobody stops to check. But the escape is the easy part, as it turns out. Everything after it is a tangle.

His accomplices have kidnapped Beth, his illegitimate daughter, who has no idea who her father is. Stone insists on phoning his estranged wife to arrange a meeting before he leaves for Russia, and he wants Beth to come with him. Around all of this, Maggie Forbes finds her own life in danger, and a Home Office contact named O'Donahue turns out to have been playing both sides.

It is a lot of plates spinning, and the episode keeps them all in the air. Stone's need to see his wife before he leaves is the kind of human detail that keeps the politics from taking over. Ray Winstone turns up early in his career as Geoff, which is one of those bits of casting that makes you do a double take now.

Paul Wheeler wrote it and Dennis Abey directed. Neil Cunningham's Edward Stone is a properly cold central performance, with Ronald Flanagan as a Prison Officer, Paul Humpoletz as the Prison Governor, Peter Llewellyn Williams as Harry, Tracy-Louise Ward as Tessa, Peter Barnes as Motorway Police, Leslie Ash's Fred and Don Warrington's Nigel in support, and Jill Gascoine's Maggie caught in the middle.

The Cold War gave this show its best material, and this opener uses it well: a man who has spent his life lying to everyone, including his own family, now needs them to trust him at the worst possible moment. The escape itself, jeep and uniform and sheer nerve, is worth the price of admission. The lies don't go away just because he has run out of road.