User Reviews

This is an excellent episode, it's a dramatic story that goes in all sorts of crazy directions after a seemingly simple case of suicide.

I loved the tone of this episode, and the fact that it wasn't the typical murder mystery, more an espionage thriller.

Some humour, Geordie's efforts to get Sidney hooked up, some lovely scenes, the finale, and some great moments of drama, where Geordie finds himself staring down the barrell of a gun.

Great performances all round, and an amazing cast, I thought Nigel Planer was especially good.

I thought this was particularly good.

I just cant get enough of her!!! She is by far my favourite character. She minces no words but you can tell she loves Sydney dearly. What a woman to have in your corner!!

Geordie and Sidney go to Cambridge University, for Sidney it is a chance to see old faces in his old university but they are really here to investigate the apparent suicide of a lecturer who jumped from the spire of King's College chapel. The lecturer's far eastern wife seems to think he might have been killed.

Geordie actually slaps her to stop her being hysterical. It might the only thing in this story that could be deemed to be historically accurate as I could not see the police being too sympathetic to a distressed foreigner in 1950s Britain.

The rest of the story is about reds under the bed with Nigel Planer playing a supercilious Don who seems to be running his own sub outlet of MI5 from Cambridge as Geordie and Sidney are threatened by spooks.

Not the best of stories despite a daring climb by our duo to reach the spire but story was rather so-so.

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.