Miss International

On paper, this one looks easy: the wife of a foreign VIP is entering a beauty contest, and the wife of a foreign VIP needs protecting while she does it. Special Branch gets the job and Jordan gets the nightmare. She is competing in the cause of female emancipation in her own country, which makes her a statement, and statements draw trouble. The protection detail looks like a week of standing at the back of a hall, until the moment someone stops watching.

The episode keeps the glamour and the threat on the same stage. There are spotlights and judges, an MC and a chaperone, a rival contestant in Nina Saretna, Miss Amsterdam in the line-up too, and somewhere behind the curtains a genuine danger that the bright lights only make harder to see. The M.C. keeps the show moving, the chaperone keeps the girls in line, and the whole bright machine hums along as if nothing could possibly go wrong. Roy Bottomley and Tom Brennand wrote it and Jim Goddard directed, and the tone lands somewhere between a seaside beauty show and a security briefing.

And the show is smart about what it will not say. The wife's cause is real and her position is political, and Jordan's job is to keep her alive long enough for the voting. Nobody reads a speech about it. There is a real threat in the mix, and the contest's own rules make it harder to guard against. The tension just sits there under the music.

Derren Nesbitt's Jordan and Fulton Mackay's Inman anchor it, with Morris Perry as Moxon, Jasmina Hilton as Farida Gemal, Yutte Stensgaard as Nina Saretna, Murray Hayne as the MC, Barbara Keogh as the Chaperone, Alfred Bell as Det. Sgt. Mills, Rona Bower as Miss Amsterdam and Marc Boyle as Devereaux.

Bright lights, evening gowns, a man from Special Branch checking the exits. Even the most polished stage, the episode insists, can hide real peril.