An Enemy of the State

An Enemy of the State arrived on BBC-2 as a taut, intelligently constructed thriller that felt uncannily contemporary for its time. Opening a new season of serials, it wasted no time establishing its central tension: the collision between private loyalty and public duty in a world where espionage had moved beyond battle plans and into boardrooms, factories and data.

At the centre of the drama is Harry Sutton, played with quiet intensity by Charles ‘Bud’ Tingwell (Emergency-Ward 10). Sutton is an electronics engineer whose devotion to his struggling computer business has begun to eclipse his marriage. His wife Jennifer, sensitively portrayed by Veronica Strong, voices the emotional cost of his obsession with weary frustration. Their strained relationship grounds the serial in recognisable domestic reality, making Harry’s later moral compromises all the more unsettling.

The plot is set in motion when Sutton secures a lucrative contract to install a British computer in Moscow, a deal that promises to rescue him from financial ruin. Before he departs, however, he is visited by the impeccably polite yet deeply unsettling Mr Henderson (Robert Mill), a man who claims to be an unimportant civil servant but knows far too much about Sutton’s life. Henderson’s proposition—essentially asking Sutton to act as an unwitting spy behind the Iron Curtain—exploits not ideology, but vulnerability. This is espionage as economic coercion, and it is precisely what makes the drama so topical.

Ken Hughes’ script, informed by his own visits to Russia, is refreshingly free of cartoon villainy. Instead, it presents espionage as a murky, morally ambiguous business where ordinary people are manipulated by forces they barely understand. Hughes’ experience as both a writer and director is evident in the assured pacing and the vivid sense of place, while James Cellan Jones’ direction lends the serial a documentary-like realism that heightens the tension.

As Sutton becomes increasingly entangled in events beyond his control—implicated in murder, abandoned by his supposed protector, and pursued by Soviet security—the story evolves into a gripping cat-and-mouse game. The irony is cruel and compelling: a man who never set out to betray anyone finds himself branded an enemy of the state, facing trial and even execution unless he confesses to connections he barely comprehends.

Supported by a strong ensemble cast and produced with confidence by Alan Bromly, An Enemy of the State stands as a vibrant and unsettling thriller. It reflects a changing world in which spies no longer look like spies, and the greatest danger lies not in ideology, but in the quiet erosion of personal choice. As an opener for BBC-2’s new thriller season, it is both exciting drama and sharp social commentary—very much, as Radio Times suggested, “as topical as today’s newspaper.”