Red Herring

London is being blown apart piece by piece. A string of bombings has the city on edge, and Special Branch find themselves working alongside Captain Dwyer, a bomb-disposal expert, in a race to stop the next one. The trail leads to a group of young Londoners with links to the IRA, the Communist Party and anarchist circles, an alliance unlikely enough that the title starts doing its own work.

The episode keeps its feet in two camps. There is the technical business of the bombs, the sweaty, careful work of getting close to a device and staying alive while you do. And there is the messier business of the young men and women setting them, the half-formed politics and the older hands nudging them along. Peter Hill's script juggles both, and the balance holds. Borotchek hovers somewhere in the middle of it, the sort of figure who is always at the edge of the frame.

Mike Vardy directed. George Sewell is Craven, Roger Rowland is North. Norman Jones brings a quiet professional calm to Captain Dwyer, Leon Eagles is Borotchek, Roger Lloyd Pack is Paul, Diana Quick is Sarah, Billy Hamon is Chris, Hilda Barry is Mrs. McCafferty and Sara Aimson is Rosemary Brown. Lloyd Pack would find fame later as Trigger, but here he plays something closer to the real thing, a young man in over his head with his hand on a fuse.

The episode works best as a snapshot of its moment. The politics feel lived-in, the bombers feel like a genuine problem of the period rather than a convenient plot device, and the bomb-disposal sequences carry a tension no amount of studio chatter can fake. It is dated in the way all good period television is dated, honest about its time and quietly useful as a record of it. The title promises a false trail somewhere, and the episode obliges without cheating.