Unusual Approach

'C' decides Burnside needs a holiday, which in this building is a professional hazard. He is ordered to a planning conference in Rhodes, in the company of Matthew Peele and Sir Geoffrey Wellingham, two men whose idea of a good time is not, one suspects, Burnside's. The working holiday is barely underway before the woman arrives: attractive, Greek, and almost certainly KGB in Burnside's professional opinion. He decides to play along. It's the only exercise he's getting. The conference proceeds without him, more or less, which is exactly how he likes it.

Back in London, the other half of the episode runs on a different clock. With Burnside away, Willie Caine is acting as Director of Operations, and Jeff Ross comes to him with a request: help extract an injured American agent from inside the Soviet Union. Caine dispatches Mike Wallace. And then, too late, he realises the mission was compromised from the start. The set-up is the point, and the question is who is behind it. Ross has asked for a favour with strings attached, and Caine, standing in for Burnside, has no room to refuse. The operation was blown before Wallace ever got on the plane.

Written by Ian MacKintosh and directed by David Cunliffe, first shown on 23 June 1980. Roy Marsden heads the cast as Burnside, with Ray Lonnen's Willie Caine, Michael Cashman's Mike Wallace and Bob Sherman's Jeff Ross. Alan MacNaughtan, Jerome Willis, Dennis Burgess as 'C', Rio Fanning, Philip Bond and David Horovitch complete the ensemble.

The pleasure of the structure is the contrast: Burnside fencing with a suspected KGB woman over dinner while Caine watches his man walk into a trap he should have seen. Two kinds of danger, one sunlit and one cold. The episode makes you feel the distance between them.