Always Glad to Help

"Always Glad to Help" is the episode where the SIS plans to throw over an Arab government and cannot stop arguing about it. The target nation has close links with Moscow, which makes the whole business urgent; the fact that it is also delicate makes it an argument magnet. It sounds dramatic on paper. In practice it means careful work, patient intelligence gathering and a great deal more fighting, because Whitehall cannot agree on anything without a row.

Dickens gets the delicate end of it, assigned to find out where an influential Arab sheik's sympathies really lie. Burnside is at war with his own side, clashing with Deputy Chief Matthew Peele and the Ministry of Defence over a covert scuba-diving operation that nobody can explain to anyone's satisfaction. The MoD men treat the diving gear as if it were a declaration of war, which tells you everything about how seriously this department takes itself. Dickens' task is the one with the longest odds: one man's sympathies, read from a distance, could settle the fate of a government.

The title is the joke. Nobody in this building is ever glad to help; they help because they have to, and the episode enjoys watching the favours being called in. Even the throw-over itself stays off screen. What matters is the arguing that surrounds it, and behind the procedural bickering sits a country about to change rulers. And nobody in the room forgets that.

Ian MacKintosh wrote it, David Reynolds directed. Roy Marsden leads the cast as Burnside, with Richard Vernon's 'C', Ray Lonnen's Willie Caine, Alan MacNaughtan's Sir Geoffrey Wellingham, Jerome Willis's Matthew Peele and Diane Keen's Laura Dickens around him. Peter Miles plays Hamad, Bob Sherman Jeff Ross, Elizabeth Bennett Diane Lawler and Gerald James the Director General of Intelligence.

The hour is mostly meetings and memos, and it is the better for it. In this world the arguments happen before the diving does, and watching seasoned professionals argue about scuba gear with a straight face is its own quiet pleasure.