The Sins of the Fathers

The Sins of the Fathers, scripted by Jeremy Burnham and directed by Peter Hammond, takes Morse into the warm, yeasty world of a family brewery and finds the rot beneath the malt. Trevor Radford, the managing director of Radford's, is found dead in one of the brewery's own vats, and the question of whether he fell or was pushed arrives alongside a hostile takeover bid from a rival firm. The Radfords are a clan divided, and the prospect of selling has already set brother against brother and wife against husband long before the body is found.

The family is the real subject. Paul Shelley's Stephen Radford, the entrepreneurial younger brother who would gladly be rid of a losing proposition, clashes with Lionel Jeffries's Charles, the patriarch determined to protect a tradition now a century and a half old. Lisa Harrow's Thelma and Kim Thomson's Helen sit at the eye of the storm, and the revelation that Trevor's wife was conducting an affair with Stephen keeps the motive swinging between greed and passion. When Stephen himself is murdered in near-identical circumstances, and a solicitor, Nelson, becomes a third victim, the pattern points to a reckoning older than the takeover.

Hammond, a veteran of the series, stages the brewing halls and boardroom with a fond, almost nostalgic eye that makes the violence all the more jarring. Alex Jennings's Victor Preece, twitchy and over-eager to help, becomes the quiet pivot: he is a descendant of Knox, the brewery's 1850 partner, cheated out of his share, and his revenge drives the deaths of the two Radford brothers. Thomson and Harrow ensure the women are never mere ornaments to the men's plotting. By the final act the brewery stands as a monument to the sins the family committed to keep it, and Morse's solution is less a triumph than an audit of a grievance nursed across generations, where loyalty and ownership curdled into something poisonous. Jennings lets Preece's nervousness curdle into something dangerous, and the boardroom scenes gain a real charge from the knowledge that the man taking notes is the man with the oldest score to settle. Hammond cuts between the gleaming copper of the vats and the cramped, resentful kitchens where the family actually lives, so the brewery itself becomes a character. By the close the famous name proves no shield against the sins its founders committed, and Morse is left to explain to the survivors that justice, this time, arrived a hundred and forty years late. The takeover bid, for all the noise it makes, turns out to be a distraction from the older wound, and Morse's instinct that the family's wealth was built on a theft proves uncomfortably close to the mark. Shelley and Jeffries play the brothers as two halves of a single denial, each certain the other is the problem, and Thomson's Helen carries the burden of a marriage entangled with both. The vats, once a symbol of craft, become the instrument of the family's unmaking, and Hammond resists any urge to romanticise the trade. The final unmasking of Preece is small, almost petty in its motive, and that is the point: a brewery honoured for a century was founded on a cheat that someone, eventually, chose to answer for.