Vanity Dies Hard: Part One

Alice Whittaker, a rich woman in her late thirties, marries Andrew Fielding, a good-looking young teacher more than ten years her junior. On paper it is the sort of arrangement that makes neighbours raise an eyebrow and friends hold their tongues. For a while, all seems well. Then Alice introduces Andrew to Nesta Drage, her best friend, and Nesta vanishes without trace.

The disappearance is the crack in the marriage's polished surface. Alice has always known the age gap invited the gold-digger question, and now she starts asking it herself: does Andrew love her, or did he marry her for the money, and if so, might he have something to do with Nesta's disappearance? The suspicion curdles into something worse when Andrew does his best to tie his wife to the house, controlling her movements while the investigation into her friend's fate goes nowhere. The claustrophobia is the point. A woman trapped in her own home with a man she no longer trusts and a friend who has simply ceased to exist.

Eleanor David plays Alice with a growing, unplaceable dread, and Jane Gurnett's Nesta hangs over the hour without being present. The Whittaker family circle is well stocked: Leslie Phillips' Justin, Leonard Preston's Hugo, Melanie Kilburn's Jackie and Damian Hunt's Mark, with Peter Egan's Harry Blunden, Rebecca Lacey's Daphne Feast, David Hargreaves' Mr Feast and Arthur White's Mr Snow filling the edges. Julian Bond wrote it, and Alan Grint directed.

The episode works by making the ordinary feel unsafe. A big house, a younger husband, a vanished friend: none of it is a crime yet, and all of it feels like one. Alice's search for Nesta begins against Andrew's wishes, and the hour ends with the questions stacked higher than the answers, which is exactly where a first part belongs.