A Hiding to Nothing

A dummy run for a state visit gets recorded by a foreign student, and that is the leak that sets everything off. Palestinian leader Khadi is due in London for secret peace talks, and somebody has been filming the rehearsal of his arrival. Then a woman terrorist is shot during the filming itself, and CI5 have a security breach on their hands with blood on it. The rehearsal was meant to be a secret dry run; instead it becomes the first scene of an assassination plot.

The trail leads to Frances Cottingham, a ministerial secretary, who innocently passed news of Khadi's visit to her boyfriend. The boyfriend is not who he says he is. Cowley plays a careful game, feeding her false information to see where it goes, and the episode does a decent job of making you wonder whether the man running the operation might be the assassin after all. It is the sort of suspicion the show enjoys planting and then refusing to water.

Brian Clemens and Ted Childs wrote it, Gerry O'Hara directed. Sylvia Kay is Frances Cottingham, Lise Hilboldt is Shelley, with Nadim Sawalha as Doad, Christopher Reich as Luis, Gerald Sim as Colonel Masterson, Phillada Sewell as Mrs. Cottingham and Nayef Rashed as Hassam Alousha.

What stays with you is the smallness of the leak. No mole in the security services, no grand betrayal: just a secretary telling her boyfriend something she should not have. The show knows that is how secrets usually die, quietly and by accident, and it builds the whole hour around that unglamorous truth. The ministerial offices and the rehearsal footage give the story a properly bureaucratic texture, all clipboards and dry runs.

And the title earns its keep. Once the assassination is in play, everyone involved is on a hiding to nothing, and nobody gets to walk away clean.