Season 01 Episode 01

1953. Sidney Chambers, vicar of Grantchester, spends a morning by the River Cam with Amanda Kendall, the friend he loves and has never told. He is late for the funeral of Stephen Staunton, a Cambridge solicitor whose death has been recorded as suicide, and his housekeeper Mrs Maguire says so. At the funeral he comforts the dead man's young German widow, Hildegard Staunton. Afterwards Pamela Morton, wife of Staunton's business partner Clive Morton, asks to see him privately. She says she and Stephen were lovers and were going to run away to the south of France, and that a man planning a new life does not shoot himself. Unable to go to the police because of the affair, she asks Sidney to make enquiries.

Sidney takes this to Inspector Geordie Keating at Cambridge police station. Geordie is dismissive, because Staunton drank, owed money and left a note, and tells him to go back to the church. Sidney works around him. He visits Staunton's office, where the secretary Annabel Morrison describes finding the body. He visits Hildegard, who says her marriage was unhappy, that she will return to Berlin, and that her husband used to walk at night. Whisky supplies the first hard clue, because Clive Morton offers Sidney a brand that is not Staunton's usual Jameson's, which makes Sidney doubt Morton's account of the firm's finances. Hildegard lets Sidney into the house and he takes Staunton's diary without asking. Reading it, he sees the suicide note was not a farewell but a letter ending a relationship. Amanda then tells him she is engaged to Guy Hopkins. He had been about to ask her to run away with him, and a black Labrador puppy arrives at the vicarage the next day as a present from her.

The murderer is Annabel Morrison, Staunton's secretary and the second woman in his life. He had ended that affair in order to leave with Pamela Morton, and Annabel shot him and arranged the scene as a suicide. She is exposed when she follows Pamela to the railway station and tries to push her in front of a train, and Geordie arrests her. Hildegard gives Sidney something to remember her by, the dog is walked, and Sidney preaches on moving forward, saying he is glad he is not married.

The episode is a direct adaptation of the first story in Runcie's first book, and the Bloomsbury event of December 2014 heard that it was followed closely but that the opening was rebuilt around Sidney and Amanda rather than the crime. ITV commissioned the six parts on 7 November 2013 from Lovely Day, a sister company of Kudos, in association with Masterpiece, with Diederick Santer executive producing and Harry Bradbeer leading as director.

What the programme establishes in an hour is the whole arrangement the series runs on for the next nine years: a detective who is not a detective, an inspector who does not want him, a village that gives the stories their shape, and a man whose public manner and private damage sit at an angle. The whisky clue is the model for everything that follows, because the case turns on a brand of drink rather than on an interview, and the episode places Sidney's war flashbacks beside the crime so that the investigation and the illness arrive together.