The Professor

The Professor opens with a body at a famous Amsterdam hotel, and the man in the bed is not who his papers say. Van der Valk soon suspects a distinguished figure with a habit of changing who he is, and the inquiry pulls the detective into a life built on contradiction. The dead man was a married university professor who kept a second identity and, worse, affairs with his own students.

The episode works the gap between the public self and the private one. A man respected in his field turns out to have lived several lives at once, and the murder is the point where they collided. Van der Valk has to gather the people who knew each version of him, in his work and in his private deceptions, and work out which of them had reason to stop him. The dead man's dual existence is the engine of the plot, and the reveal of each layer lands with a small shock. The series uses its circle of regular and guest characters to show how many lives one person can keep in the air before one of them kills him.

Barry Foster plays Van der Valk, with Joanna Dunham as Arlette and Nigel Stock as Samson. Karl Howman is Eric and Michelle Newell plays Dina. Elizabeth Cassidy is Annabel and Jennifer Daniel plays Susan. Jeff Rawle is Diederick. Don Henderson is Ullman and John Woodnutt plays Dr. Roest. Roger Marshall and Nicolas Freeling wrote it; Ted Childs directed.

What gives the hour its bite is the ordinariness of the setting. A hotel room and a university, the two faces of a respectable man, and the violence that joins them. The scandal is academic only on the surface. It is a contained, almost claustrophobic piece, and the Amsterdam backdrop is barely needed.

And it is quietly pointed that the professor's talent for pretence was also what got him killed. Foster's Van der Valk, piecing the roles together, makes the contradiction feel less like a puzzle than a verdict.