Part 1

A cabinet minister is shot dead outside his own home in front of his wife and children, and the British government's answer is not an investigation but an operation. Harry's Game opens with the killing of the Right Honourable Henry Danby MP and spends the rest of its first hour moving that decision down through the machinery that has to carry it out: the Ministry of Defence, the police commissioner, the generals, and finally a single officer with a false name and a room in the Falls Road.

The killer is Billy Downes, a gunman of the Provisional IRA who gets out of London and back to Belfast, where the local brigade commander hides him. Without him there is no case to build, because the people who know where he is will not say. The government's response, as the director Lawrence Gordon Clark describes it, is a political one, made by men seeking a result rather than an arrest, and the plan is to send an officer into republican Belfast to find Downes and kill him there.

That officer is Captain Harry Brown, an Ulsterman and a special forces soldier who has worked under cover in Oman. He is chosen because he can pass as one of the local population, and the episode is careful to show how little support he has. The army units in the city are not involved, the intelligence services are said to want no part of it, and Brown's only contact is a controller in London.

He takes lodgings as a merchant seaman called Harry McEvoy, finds work in a scrapyard, and begins the slow business of being seen in the places where the IRA drinks.

The first hour also begins the relationship with Josephine Laverty, a Catholic woman whose company is the one human thing in Brown's life and, inevitably, the thing that will expose him. Part 1 ends with him placed and nothing achieved: he does not know where Downes is, he has found no route to him, and the audience has been given no reason to think he will.

What surrounds Lonnen's performance is unusually well built. Yorkshire Television shot most of the serial in Leeds, using derelict nineteenth-century streets as a substitute for Belfast, with three weeks in the city itself and hired armoured vehicles standing in for the army that refused to help.

What the hour is remembered for, beyond its two leads, is the staging: riot footage built with hired armoured cars, and the Irish-language theme held back until the closing credits of each part.

The weakness of the hour is its political furniture. The cabinet ministers and service chiefs who send Brown in are given single speaking functions and no character at all, and the London scenes get their point across in a way that feels like a briefing rather than a drama. It is left to Benjamin Whitrow's Davidson, the one figure who talks to Brown without a rank or a title to hide behind, to carry what the operation costs the man running it.

What makes the opening hour work is that it refuses the shape of a detective story. There is no body to examine, no forensic trail and no suspect list, only a professional soldier being delivered into a community he is expected to betray. As the first of three parts transmitted on consecutive nights in October 1982, it is a commitment rather than a case, and the series does not reward the audience's patience until its final twenty minutes.