The Other Man

A physician named Ted Lovett has come under suspicion. The word is that he has been leaking politically sensitive trade secrets out of a former Special Branch officer's business dealings, and the file against him is growing. Craven is told to investigate the man, and the more he looks, the less he believes. The label being hung on Lovett is the heaviest one the job has, and every official voice insists the case is straightforward. Being Craven, he notices the insistence. Trade secrets from a business, passed through a doctor's surgery, is not the sort of thing Special Branch usually chases, which is precisely why Craven keeps coming back to it.

Roger Marshall wrote it, and it is the sort of script he did well: a quiet, creeping doubt, with no explosions and no comfortable answers. Dennis Vance directed. George Sewell is Craven, Roger Rowland is North. Roger Hume plays Dr. Lovett with the weary decency of a man who knows he is being watched, and Annette Crosbie is Sarah Lovett. Hume, a fine character actor, makes the man's exhaustion visible without ever asking for sympathy. Sheila Scott Wilkinson is Pam Sloane, John Arnatt is Denning, Beth Harris is Andrea Watkins, Seymour Green is the Bank Manager, Tim Barrett is Grindley and Malcolm Terris completes the cast.

Marshall wrote for The Avengers in its prime, and it shows in the way the dialogue carries information without announcing it. The investigation takes in a bank manager, an office, a woman named Andrea Watkins, and the small betrayals that make up a case file, and none of it adds up the way the accusers would like.

But Craven has to go through the motions of building a case against a man he is coming to believe is innocent, and the strain shows in everything Sewell does with his face and his silences. The episode runs on doubt rather than gunfire, and it is all the more unsettling for it. Nobody shouts. That is the point.