The Pleasure of Your Company

Two meetings, both of them perfectly legal, and both of them enough to worry Special Branch. Inman meets the CIA's new man in London. Jordan catches up with an old friend from Moscow, a man called Anatoli Golovin. On their own, neither meeting is anybody's business. Now and again the two men are seen together, and a pattern starts to form, and a pattern is what pulls the team into international politics. Nobody has done anything wrong, which is exactly what makes it so hard to act on.

George Markstein wrote it and William G. Stewart directed, and the episode is mostly a study in how small coincidences get read as grand designs. The CIA man is Lester Swift, played by Bruce Boa with a careful pleasantness that is its own warning sign. Ed Potter drifts through the margins. A U.S. Air Force colonel and a shoe salesman each get a moment, the show's way of saying the watchers are everywhere. The meetings keep happening at intervals, and the intervals are where the story lives. The episode has no villain to point at, which makes the atmosphere work harder.

And the trick of the piece is that nothing illegal ever happens on screen. Everyone is within their rights. That is precisely what makes Jordan and Inman uneasy, and the viewer too. Legal and alarming are not opposites in this world.

Derren Nesbitt's Jordan and Fulton Mackay's Inman anchor it, with Morris Perry as Moxon, Sandra Bryant as Christine Morris, Peter Arne as Anatoli Golovin, Daniel Moynihan as Ed Potter, Bruce Boa as Lester Swift, Derek Murcott as the U.S. Air Force Colonel, Bill Horsley as the Shoe Salesman and Lane Meddick as the Hall Porter.

Two old acquaintances, one pleasant chat each. The episode leaves you distrusting a perfectly normal Tuesday. And that is its quiet achievement: it makes a handshake feel like a conspiracy.