Official Secret

A disgruntled former government official is convinced that double agents are still working inside the intelligence service. He is willing to tip off the press unless something is done about it, and the threat lands on the Coordinator's desk. Her answer is Palfrey. He is sent to head the man off, and he goes about it in his own fashion, laying bait to trap the suspected traitor operating within the organisation. The external threat is the cover; the internal hunt is the real game. The man is right to be angry, which is what makes him dangerous; a paranoid with evidence is harder to wave away than a fantasist.

George Markstein wrote the episode and Christopher Hodson directed it, and the doubling of suspicion, outward and inward, gives the hour its shape. Everybody in it is watching somebody else. The hour plays its cards close, trusting the audience to keep track of who is lying to whom.

The cast is led by Alec McCowen as Palfrey and Caroline Blakiston as the Coordinator, with Clive Wood as Blair, Briony McRoberts as Caroline, Deborah Grant as Yelena, Maurice Denham as Benedict, David Quilter as John McNair, Jeffry Wickham as Palliser, Gary Waldhorn as Garforth and Sarah Sherborne as Betty Scott. Maurice Denham alone is a reason to watch anything. Waldhorn, later to grumble through The Vicar of Dibley as Councillor Horton, plays Garforth with the same gift for polite obstruction.

It is a satisfying piece about institutional rot and the man trusted to sweep it without being seen to sweep. The bait goes down, the trap closes, and the question of who was corrupt and who was merely careless gets answered in the show's quiet, unmistakeable way. And there is something comforting about watching a master of the old school handle a mess that the modern world has made.