A Pillar of the Community

Vicky Jeffreys arrives in Lochdubh with a plan for Lochdubh Day and the energy to push it through, and the village never quite recovers. She is determined to put the reluctant locals back in touch with their Highland heritage, whether they want to be in touch with it or not. They do not, on the whole. Her husband Paul trails along behind her, a witness more than a participant, and Esme Murray, among others, watches the newcomer steamroll the annual celebrations with a mixture of horror and fascination.

The campaign of forced culture alienates people by the day, and then it turns properly nasty: Vicky begins receiving anonymous threats. The threats are unsettling precisely because they are anonymous, and Hamish has to weigh the village's growing dislike of Vicky against the very real danger the notes represent. It is the kind of case where the crime is real but the motive is almost entirely about manners. The Jeffreys are newcomers, which means they are treated with suspicion before they have even opened their mouths.

Stuart Hepburn wrote it, Nicholas Renton directed, and the episode aired in April 1995. Phyllida Law gives Vicky a steely charm that explains why nobody can simply tell her to stop, while David Ryall's Paul hovers around the edges of her schemes. Robert Carlyle is Hamish, doing his usual trick of letting the village solve itself while looking as though he has nothing to do with it. Anne Lacey's Esme Murray, Jimmy Yuill as Lachlan McCrae, Stuart Davids as Lachie McCrae Jr., Stuart McGugan's Barney Meldrum and Barbara Rafferty's Agnes Meldrum fill out the community, with John McLean and Kay McLean as Wee Boy and Wee Girl.

But the episode is really about the collision between good intentions and Highland stubbornness, and it knows which side to back. Watching an entire village quietly refuse to be organised is a pleasure that hasn't dated a day.