You Won't Remember Me

An engaged couple is being watched around the clock, and nobody is telling Craven why. The groom-to-be has international connections, which in this world is roughly the same as a written confession, but Craven looks at the pair and cannot find the guilt in them. He is ordered to keep the surveillance going anyway, and so he does, with the air of a man waiting for the punchline. International connections is the official reason, and it is the kind of reason that means nothing and everything at once.

But David and Clare go about their days under a weight of watchers. David is played by Michael Latimer, Clare by Mary Maude, and around them drift a Scotswoman, a jeweller, a cabby, a man in a phone booth and a sergeant on the telephone. Every detail of the couple's routine is logged, from the jeweller they visit to the cab they take, and the file grows fat while the case stays thin. The script keeps the machinery of surveillance in plain sight, right down to the boredom of a long shift.

Anthony Skene wrote it, John Robins directed. George Sewell is Craven, Roger Rowland is North, and Sheila Scott Wilkinson is Pam Sloane. Renee Houston, a music-hall veteran by then, is the Scotswoman, Billy Milton is the Jeweller, Leo Dolan is the Cabby, Tony Thawnton is the Man in Phone Booth and Neal Arden is the Sgt. Operator.

The episode rests on the awkwardness of watching two innocent people, and it refuses to resolve the awkwardness in a hurry. Craven's professional skepticism is the whole story, and the show has the confidence to let it be. Twenty-four hours a day, two lives laid open, and at the end of it Craven still has no better answer than he did at the start. It is a story about the machinery of suspicion, and about the man running it who has started to wonder who else is being watched, and why.