Double Exposure

Craven and Haggerty are handed a photographer. Strand is handsome, successful, and very good at taking intimate pictures of the famous, and somebody upstairs wants to know whether he is a patriot or a security risk. The two men spend the episode deciding which, and the deciding turns out to be the interesting part. The assignment is a background check wearing a gun and a warrant card, the sort of job that sounds simple until you start it.

Michael J. Bird wrote it, Don Leaver directed. Paul Eddington is Strand, a wonderful piece of casting: the face of a man you would trust with anything, which is exactly why the questions are being asked. Eddington would go on to play Jim Hacker in Yes Minister, and it is hard not to watch him here and see the same knack for looking innocent while quietly getting his way. The surveillance is conducted with the care of men who know they are being watched back, and the photographs at the centre of it all sit at the heart of every interview.

Frederick Jaeger is Commander Fletcher, Gabriella Licudi is Lena Drummond, Stuart Wilson is Steven Gill, Terence Bayler is a Security Man, Peter Needham is the Detective Sergeant, Kenneth Watson is the Detective Inspector and Ralph Watson is the Detective in Car.

But the episode is a character study dressed as a spy story. There are no car chases to speak of; the drama is in watching two detectives read a man, and in watching the man read them back. Lena Drummond and Steven Gill move through Strand's world, and the security men watch from doorways, and the whole thing feels like a portrait of a city learning to distrust its own glamour. Strand's work is the point. A camera pointed at the powerful is a weapon, and the show knows it. It is a quiet episode with a sharp centre, and the centre is Eddington.