Foyle's War, ITV1

Although that means only three episodes, a two-hour Foyle can normally be relied on to pack in a nutritious mix of whodunnit, plausible characterisation and (the trump card) a well-researched dollop of period history. Looking at the progress of the Second World War through the eyes of a provincial detective based in Hastings, on England's south coast, can't have sounded like the most gripping premise for a drama series, but creator/writer Anthony Horowitz has proved ingenious at using the effects of the war on little lives in obscure places as a keyhole into a broader picture. Sceptics sometimes accuse Foyle's War of being Sunday-night comfort food, but the wartime Britain it inhabits has a dingy, make-do-and-mend feel about it that sets it apart from your Poirots or Touches of Frost.

All that aside, the success of Foyle is due in large measure to Michael Kitchen's quietly addictive performance in the title role. This reticent and hardly-ever-interviewed actor has taken control of Foyle just as assuredly as John Thaw did of Morse, and has propelled the art of the quizzically raised eyebrow and the terse one-liner to new frontiers. Rarely has a performance better exemplified the truism that emotion suppressed invariably trumps breast-beating histrionics.

Technically they should have called this new series Foyle's Peace, since we found ourselves in June 1945, after the closure of hostilities in Europe (can't imagine they're going to redeploy Foyle to the Pacific to police the Japanese surrender). However, though the military campaigns are over, all kinds of other conflicts are breaking out. Maurice Jones (Tom Goodman-Hill), son of the wealthy and aristocratic Sir Leonard Spencer-Jones (Christopher Good), has fallen out with his father because of his political beliefs. He is standing as a Labour candidate for the post-war government which was about to blow away Churchill's Conservatives, and making ranting speeches about overthrowing the upper classes.

The main thrust of the story centred on the fate of White Russians (ie Tsarists) who had been captured by the Allies while fighting for the Germans in France. The British government was secretly preparing to repatriate them to the Soviet Union, at Stalin's behest, well aware that they would be exterminated by the merciless dictator. All historically true, unfortunately. Between the lines, you could feel the temperature plummeting inexorably towards the Cold War.

In Foyle's world, this brutal exhibition of realpolitik was refracted through the experiences of a couple of escaped Russian PoWs, one of whom committed suicide rather than face repatriation, and a teenage boy who had been working on Sir Leonard's estate. Fortuitously, Foyle's previous right-hand woman Samantha Stewart (Honeysuckle Weeks, pictured above, still looking as if she'd stepped straight from the pages of Evelyn Waugh) was also in Sir Leonard's employ as all-purpose assistant and, startlingly, nude model for his paintings. Sir Leonard's murder duly led to the serendipitous arrival at the Spencer-Jones estate of both Foyle and the series' other hardy perennial, Paul Milner (Anthony Howell). Milner, now a Detective Inspector based in Brighton, has acquired a hefty chip on his shoulder about the professional debt he owes to Foyle, which earned him a clipped but devastating rebuke from his former boss.

This episode also maintained another Foyle-centric tradition, the inclusion of a duplicitous Establishment figure who tries to strong-arm Foyle into doing something disreputable while keeping him in the dark about his real motives. This time the role fell to Tim Pigott-Smith as Brigadier Wilson, a blustering War Office toady trying to enlist Foyle in rounding up the missing Russians so they could be carted off to Uncle Joe's death squads. Foyle, having somewhat melodramatically escaped being bumped off by an agent from SMERSH, was able to exact a measure of revenge by blackmailing the apoplectic brigadier into saving Russian teenager Nikolai. From such small victories is Foyle's War constructed.

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