Program Title
A Murder of Quality

Episode Title
Part 1

Episode number:
1 2

Description
In response to a plea for help from a former intelligence colleague, George Smiley, goes to Carne School in Dorset to investigate a sensational murder - a murder that has been forecast by the victim. Joining the police investigation, Smiley soon finds himself in a world of social tensions and hidden secrets where everyone seems to have a motive

Original broadcast date
1991-10-13

Cast	Characters
Glenda Jackson	Ailsa Brimley
Denholm Elliott	George Smiley
Joss Ackland	Terence Fielding
Billie Whitelaw	Mad Janie
David Threlfall	Stanley Rode
Ronald Pickup	Felix D'Arcy
Matthew Scurfield	Inspector Rigby
Christian Bale	Tim Perkins
Diane Fletcher	Shane Hecht
Fiona Walker	Dorothy D'Arcy
Nick Reding	Sergeant Mellor
Michael Cochrane	Charles Hecht

Credits
Executive Producer: Brian Walcroft
Producer: Eric Abraham
Director: Gavin Millar

Intro
A Murder of Quality/Part 1/Intro by Alistair Cooke

Good evening, I'm Alistair Cooke.

Tonight we begin a murder mystery in two parts, the only novel by John le Carré, I believe, that's not about spies and spying. Incidentally, he wrote the screenplay. Now you may remember that a year or two ago we put on a dramatization of A Perfect Spy, which le Carré admitted was as close to an autobiographical novel as he would come. The main character, Magnus Pym, like le Carré, went to an English public school, studied in Switzerland, was drafted into the army, drifted into army intelligence, came out, went into the foreign service in Vienna, and quit. Le Carré did this by choice; Pym, you recall, did this by suicide.

In tonight's story, le Carré returns to the location and the social/moral atmosphere of an English public school of forty years ago. Once again the mystery falls into the hands of le Carré's unique creation--the plumb, tired, middle-aged, kindly intellectual George Smiley. Now in the beginning Smiley is on a sabbatical when he hears from an old colleague in intelligence, Miss Ailsa Brimley. She's played here by Glenda Jackson, an intelligence type that le Carré has recently described as the last generation of secret service vestals--clever ladies who joined the service in war and stayed on to fight the peace.

Well, Brim, as she's called, tells Smiley that she'd just had a letter from a schoolmaster's wife saying that her husband was going to kill her. Would Smiley come to the rescue? A Murder of Quality, episode one.



Episode number: 1 2




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