An Advancement of Learning

The films' working methods are reversed here. This case takes place in Pascoe's world, on the campus of a college absorbed into the University of Mid-Yorkshire five years earlier, with Dalziel as the visitor. A large metal sculpture is being lifted from its plinth in the car park under the supervision of Marion Carreaux, a former student of the college, now an artist of international reputation and its Head of Fine Arts, and the sculptor of the piece. The memorial was commissioned to mark the college's old existence. When the then principal, Alison Girling, was killed while on holiday in Austria, it became a memorial to her instead. Under its base is a concealed skeleton, and forensics identify it as Girling's.

The discovery runs alongside a disciplinary process. Student Anita Sewell has brought a sexual harassment claim against her professor, Dr Sam Fallowfield. She then turns up dead, naked and face down on a nearby golf course, her body covered with autumn leaves, found by her solicitor and by an eccentric birdwatcher. The police work hardens around Fallowfield. He is exposed as neither the philandering lecturer the investigation was pointed at nor a double murderer, but the case against him has already done its damage. His house is broken into and daubed with anti-gay slogans, and the students wreck the temporary police headquarters on campus, which draws Dalziel's fury. Then Fallowfield is found dead, and the film is clear that his death is suicide. The forensics on Sewell provide the turn, because she was a virgin. Her harassment claim had been built on marks Fallowfield gave her after their affair ended, and the affair was not what the file said.

Francis Roote, the Student Union President, and Marion Carreaux killed Alison Girling five years earlier, and the same two killed Anita Sewell. Fallowfield, who was gay and closeted, helped conceal the first death; his own death was suicide and not a third murder. Dalziel's early aside to Pascoe, after one exchange too many with Roote, that if they need somebody fitted up for the murders it will be Roote, turns out to be the answer, which is the film's best structural joke. The ending is deliberately unresolved on which account of the first killing will survive. Roote tells a story of accidental death, a slip and a fall and a head split open on a stone fireplace. Carreaux describes a drugged rage and a poker. The film closes with the question of whether Roote's version will carry.

This is Alan Plater's second of two Series 1 scripts, and the novel was updated from 1971 to the mid-1990s. The animosity between the police and the campus is cut back hard, and so is Ellie's hostility to the police as an institution, so that both leads stay sympathetic inside a continuing series. The most substantial change is Ellie, who in the novel is a former girlfriend met again and hostile to Pascoe for joining the force. Here she is his current girlfriend, working at the college as a lecturer in Social Sciences, and the relationship is affectionate with a dry edge. Plater adds a scene with no equivalent in the book in which Dalziel tells her she ought to marry Pete, and that scene feeds directly into the third film, which opens with the wedding.

Fallowfield's homosexuality is the other change of substance. In the 1971 novel a closeted gay academic is unremarkable in context; moved to 1996, the concealment sits awkwardly against the story's assumption of a liberal campus, and the anti-gay vandalism becomes the film's main index of how badly the accusation has damaged him. Prunella Scales plays Edith Disney, a buttoned-up, religious, backward-looking woman who turns out to have almost nothing to do with the case, and she is the film's biggest piece of guest casting. James D'Arcy plays Roote as a laid-back, self-satisfied young man confident that consequences fall on other people.