Your Sudden Death Question

An empty Oxford college plays host to a quiz contest over the August Bank Holiday weekend, professional competitors gathering to chase a large prize. It is a closed, slightly absurd world, and it is broken open when Ethan Croft, the outstanding competitor of the group, is found floating dead in the college fountain. Croft, it turns out, was an outrageous flirt with a number of secrets, the kind of man who collects enemies without noticing.

Lewis and Hathaway have to work fast: the gathering is due to break up, and the suspects are about to scatter across the country. Everyone present gets questioned, from Jean Croft and Robyn Strong to Eve Rigby and Marcus Richards, and the professional politeness of the quiz world starts to crack under the pressure. In the middle of it, Hathaway uncovers a detail of his own: Lewis was planning a romantic weekend at Glyndebourne with a mystery date. The discovery gives the episode a lighter, warmer thread to run alongside the murder.

But Croft's killer is someone who could not stand being outsmarted, and that, the episode suggests, is a very Oxford motive. The quiz setting is a gift to the script, a world of people who know the answers to everything except the one question that matters.

Colin Dexter and Alan Plater wrote it, and Dan Reed directed. Adam James plays Ethan Croft, Susannah Doyle is Jean Croft, Ruth Gemmell plays Robyn Strong, Sally Bretton takes Eve Rigby, Ian Mercer plays Lester Garvey, Anna Koval is Diane Baxter, Jamie Michie plays Brian Kaye and Alan Davies appears as Marcus Richards. Kevin Whately and Laurence Fox lead as Lewis and Hathaway.

The confined setting is the whole appeal. One college, one body, a handful of people who all knew each other in the particular way of competitive strangers. And the Glyndebourne detail is a nice human touch, proof that even Lewis is allowed a private life, however badly he hides it.