Family Tradition

At an annual lunch with Sir Edward Jordan, the man who recruited Nigel into the unit, the talk turns to Sir Edward's son Howard. Howard is a civil servant with access to secrets, and he has been acting strangely. The unit takes an interest, and Maggie gets to know the family properly at Sir Edward's seventieth birthday party, which is the sort of social occasion that is actually a surveillance operation.

Howard's strange behaviour ends in a failed suicide bid, and that is the hinge of the episode. The suicide bid is handled carefully, and the episode earns the weight it gives it. Maggie, digging where a birthday party has let her in, discovers Sir Edward's secret, and it explains Howard's behaviour in a way that leaves no one comfortable. The title means it: the family tradition here is the thing nobody talks about.

Paul Wheeler wrote it and Raymond Menmuir directed. Alan MacNaughtan's Sir Edward is the kind of patriarch the show does well, all decency on the surface, with Michael Elwyn as Howard Jordan, Robin Kermode as Tom Byers, Lesley Clare O'Neill as Doreen McArdle, Arbel Jones as WPC Wilson, Lionel Taylor as a Customer and Joseph Long as a Waiter, while Don Warrington's Nigel and Jill Gascoine's Maggie work the case, with Leslie Ash's Fred and Tracy-Louise Ward's Tessa in support. It went out in May 1987, late in the third series. Paul Wheeler, who wrote it, had also written Country Weekend earlier in the run, and both episodes share his habit of putting the unit's women in someone else's house and watching what happens.

The birthday party setting is the episode's best decision. Secrets behave differently at parties, half out in the open, half in the kitchen. And the resolution, when it comes, lands harder than the party chatter suggests it will. It is the sort of story the show did best in its later years: a family secret, a birthday party, and a detective who knows the polite surface is the last place to look.