All in a Good Cause

Season three opens with a domestic problem, which turns out to be the best possible camouflage. Jeff Ross, the CIA's head of station in London, has a marriage in trouble and asks Burnside for help. Reports reach Burnside that Ross's wife Marianne is seeing another man, and he starts to look into it, half as a friend and half as a security man who can't help himself. The word comes from MI5, which is reason enough to take it seriously.

And the more he looks, the less private the matter is. MI5 has already taken an interest in the Ross marriage; now Burnside comes to suspect the KGB does too. What began as a favour for a friend becomes a small knot of Cold War suspicion, two intelligence services watching the same unhappy couple for reasons of their own. For Burnside the calculation is simple and ugly: a friend's marriage is a weakness, and weakness in the head of London Station is a security problem dressed up as a personal one. Nobody in the building says it out loud. Everyone understands.

Written by Ian MacKintosh and directed by Peter Cregeen, first shown on 9 June 1980. Roy Marsden leads as Burnside, with Bob Sherman's Jeff Ross and Sue Holderness as Marianne Straker. Ray Lonnen, Michael Cashman, Alan MacNaughtan, Jerome Willis, Peter Laird, Gale Gladstone and Dennis Burgess as 'C' complete the cast.

It's satisfying television because the personal stays personal. The agencies circle the marriage, but the hurt at the centre of it never gets lost in the tradecraft, and that's the harder trick of the two. Ross asked for help and got an investigation; the gap between those two things is where the episode lives. And when the KGB and MI5 are both watching, nobody gets to call it a private matter.