The Lake of Darkness Part 1

Martin Urban is a quiet accountant who keeps his head down and his life small. Then he wins the lottery. It should be the happiest day of his life, and for a while it probably feels like one. But a sudden pile of money has a way of bringing people out of the woodwork, and one of them is Francesca, who is not what she seems. From that point the win stops looking like a blessing and starts looking like a problem.

That is the engine of The Lake of Darkness Part 1, the first half of a two-part story. Jerome Flynn plays Martin, and the drama follows what the win does to him and to everyone around him. The money is supposed to be freedom. Instead it starts to work like a trap, drawing in Finn (Cal MacAninch) and Lena Finn (Liz Smith), and testing the people closest to Martin: Caroline, played by Martha Cope, and Tim Sage, played by Nick Reding. Mr Kaiafas (Omid Djalili) and Anne Blake (Susie Fairfax) circle the edges, and the older generation weighs in through Eric Flynn as Mr Urban and Gillian Barge as Mrs Urban, with Jean Challis as Mrs Gogarty. The shadowy figures around the windfall give the story its menace.

Peter Hammond and Ruth Rendell wrote the script, and Bruce MacDonald directed. The story is told at its own pace, and the two-part structure gives the script room to breathe. Nothing important is skipped, and that patience is part of why the two halves work as well as they do.

Part one sets the table and leaves the questions standing. Martin's fortune has made him a target, Francesca is sitting on something she isn't revealing, and the second half has a great deal to answer for. It is the rare lottery fantasy with the happy ending removed.