Polonaise

Some protection jobs are easier to swallow than others. North and Craven are assigned to guard the captain of a Polish passenger and cargo ship who is convinced somebody is coming to kill him, and the irritating part is that he is probably right. The man is a former Nazi collaborator, and the people who remember his old war crimes are not the forgiving sort. Duty says they shield him. Nothing else about the job says it with any enthusiasm.

But the detail puts the two officers in an awkward spot. They are professionals doing a professional thing for a man they plainly despise, and the script has the good sense to let that sit in the room instead of resolving it neatly. Around them move Yushin, Wednicki, Scabrienski, Bershki, Eva, Wilson and a man from the embassy, each carrying some piece of the past the captain would rather stay buried. The ship makes a good cage, with water on every side and nowhere for anyone to run. Every handshake carries a calculation, and every polite word has a history behind it.

Allan Scott and Chris Bryant wrote it, Mike Vardy directed. George Sewell is Craven, Roger Rowland is North. John Bailey plays Yushin, Richard Marner is Wednicki, André Morell is Scabrienski, George Pravda is Bershki, Milos Kirek is the Embassy Official, David Weston is Wilson and Rita Merkelis is Eva. Marner would later spend years as the lugubrious Colonel Von Strohm in 'Allo 'Allo!, which lends his quiet menace here a curious afterlife.

The captain, for his part, is no martyr; he is a frightened man who has spent a long time expecting this day. The story is a steady, grim piece of work about the weight history dumps on the present. Nobody gets to be heroic about it. Craven and North do the job, dislike every minute, and the episode never pretends the dislike is something they should simply get over. It is not a comfortable watch, and it is not meant to be. Some debts do not come with a statute of limitations.