See What You've Done

Lucy Rhodes is the secretary to Vincent Pauldron, a businessman, and on her way home she is mugged. The attack itself is straightforward; the aftermath is not. Pauldron's son Christopher tells the police that his father may well have been the attacker, which is the sort of thing a son does not say lightly. But the investigation drifts toward Richard Spencer, an oddball who left the pub early on the night in question and has been attracting attention to himself ever since. The mugging, it turns out, was the easy part. The trouble is that nobody can agree on what actually happened that night.

The episode is a study in how a simple crime picks up complications. George Sewell plays Vincent Pauldron with the heavy dignity of a man used to being believed, and Jenny Till's Lucy Rhodes carries the quiet centre of it. Alan Lake's Spencer does the oddball work with relish, and Lillias Walker's Diana Pauldron holds the family together while it is being pulled apart. Around them, Watt, Hawkins, Snow and Nesbitt sift the versions of the evening, and John Blythe's Jack Thompson adds to the witness list. Each version of the night is told with complete confidence and no corroboration.

Kingsley Amis, the novelist, shares the writing credit with Elwyn Jones, and the pub scenes have a convincing, well-observed shabbiness to them. Kenneth Ives directs, and the whole thing has the slightly sour social comedy that Amis's name promises.

The pleasure is in the sifting. Everyone who was in that pub has a slightly different account, and the truth turns out to be hiding in the details nobody thought to mention. It is a tidy, literate episode, and the title's accusation hangs over the whole of it, pointed at father, son and stranger alike. Nobody in it comes out looking entirely good, which is the point.