A Question Of Commitment - Storyboard

The trouble with being a spy, the episode says in so many words, is that sometimes you come to wonder who's doing the spying and who is the spied upon. A Question of Commitment went out in May 1989 as part of the Storyboard strand, a sequel to the Mr Palfrey of Westminster series rather than a new chapter in it. Palfrey himself is absent from the cast list. The story belongs to the people around his old patch, a gathering that seems assembled for the sole purpose of watching one another. The title gives the game away in its way: the question is who, in this business, is truly committed to whom, and how far that commitment stretches.

Clive Wood plays Blair, with Donald Burton as Cromer, Amanda Elwes as Caroline, Tim Wylton as Backman, Jeffrey Chiswick as Pavlicek, Charles Kay as Spender, Carolyn Pickles as Clare, Eric Dodson as George, Dorothea Phillips as Mary and Penny Brownjohn as Alice. Philip Broadley wrote it and Gareth Davies directed it, and the measured pace gives the ensemble room to build an atmosphere instead of rushing it. Nobody gets a hero's entrance; the drama is all in who speaks first and who flinches.

The result is a curious little study in proximity and paranoia. Everyone is polite. Everyone is watching. The danger here is the quiet kind, the sort that hides inside pleasant conversation and ordinary rooms, and you spend the hour trying to work out which of the assembled faces is doing the watching and which is being watched. But the answer, if there is one, stays buried under good manners. It is a comfortable, unsettling hour of television, and a fond footnote to the Westminster story. The episode does not need to shout to make its point about trust in a closed world.