Country Weekend

Tessa takes a weekend in the country to visit her mother, and Fred comes along for the ride. It is meant to be the quiet sort of weekend, the kind with long walks and family awkwardness, and there is plenty of awkwardness to go around, because Tessa's mother drinks. Then three men arrive, and the weekend stops being about family at all. Everyone is held hostage.

The episode does a good job of keeping the two tones together: the uncomfortable domestic stuff, which is real and lived-in, and the siege, which is sudden and violent. The Steadleigh household, the neighbours, the Colonel type down the road, all of them get caught in the same room, and the show lets the tension build the slow way. The house, big and creaky and full of family china, becomes a proper pressure cooker.

Paul Wheeler wrote it and Raymond Menmuir directed. Tracy-Louise Ward's Tessa and Leslie Ash's Fred are the professionals in the room, with Helen Ryan as Mary, Geoffrey Hinsliff as Charlie, Roger Ostime as Mr Steadleigh, Christine Shaw as Mrs Steadleigh, Richard Bebb as Col. Hackforth-Gray, Deddie Davies as Mrs Best and Michael Attwell as Jack Lee, with Jill Gascoine's Maggie on the outside working the rescue. It went out in May 1987, early in the third series. Paul Wheeler, who wrote it, had already written Good As New and Crack-Up in the second series, so the family pressure cooker was familiar ground for him.

Hostage episodes live or die on the casting of the intruders and the patience of the director, and this one has both. The Colonel and the neighbours are drawn with affection, the kind of supporting cast British television used to do in its sleep. But the detail that stays with you is the mother, and the way Tessa has to switch from daughter to operative and back again without ever quite getting to be either. The gunmen are the threat, but the mother is the ache, and the episode knows it.