The Honeypot And The Bees

A senior official at the Ministry of Defence is carrying on a clandestine affair with a young woman from Czechoslovakia. Then the couple disappear, and the Coordinator fears a serious breach in national security. That is the hook, and it is the sort of detail that makes the security services nervous, because it could be romance and could be something much worse. The combination of Cold War paranoia and a very human indiscretion is what drives the whole hour. Palfrey's own digging adds a sharper detail: a top-ranking RAF officer is being groomed by the other side in a honeypot trap, the oldest play in the espionage book.

Michael Chapman wrote the episode and Peter Cregeen directed it, and together they keep the tone taut without shouting. The title does its own advertising. The honey is the attraction; the bees are what come after it, and the episode is about how hard it is to tell the two apart until the sting lands. The disappearance is never allowed to become a statistic; the show keeps coming back to the two people involved.

Alec McCowen is in his element as Palfrey, with Caroline Blakiston as the Coordinator, Clive Wood as Blair, Briony McRoberts as Caroline, Frederick Treves as Admiral Frobisher, Catherine Neilson as Anna Capek, Leonie Mellinger as Melissa Conyers, Denis Lill as Stefan Horvath, Jiri Stanislav as Jan Pavlicek and Arthur Blake as Mr Lambton.

It is effective theatre about how personal attachments and state secrecy collide, and the collision is the point. Nobody in this world keeps a private life private for long. And the episode earns its ending by remembering that the couple at the centre were people before they were a security problem. The kind of hour that works best on a wet Sunday afternoon, when the television is doing the thinking for you.