Superficially Tim Fywell's production contains all the ingredients for a classic television mystery. Filmed in Cambridge, the action has our faithful protagonists Sidney Chambers (James Norton), and Geordie Keating (Robson Green) searching every nook and cranny of the city's labyrinthine streets for their suspects. There's a sequence straight out of THE THIRTY-NINE STEPS as our heroes scale the spires of Jesus College to discover why academic Valentine Lyall (Rob Oldfield) has fallen inexplicably to his death. There are plenty of ancient cars (all in pristine condition) plus interior sequences taking place in a smoky pub, a Cambridge don's comfortable rooms, and Chambers's house where he is waited upon by spiky housekeeper Mrs. Maguire (Tessa Peake- Jones).
But chocolate-box settings and exciting filmed sequences do not necessarily make for a piece of satisfying dramatic entertainment. Without going into too much detail, John Jackson's script has some really leaden lines in it (at one point Chambers advises Keating to "mind how you go"), and a resolution that can only be described as preposterous, containing intertextual references to Philby, Burgess and Maclean. While the preoccupation over so-called "moles" was undoubtedly significant during the Fifties, it seems a little far- fetched to assume that everyone (especially in one of Britain's two most venerable universities) suspected everyone else. Britain did not experience McCarthyism (as in the United States).
The actors do what they can with the script, but the entire venture has something of an air of desperation about it, as if Masterpiece were trying to recreate past successes with very thin material. Avoid.
