Inspector George Gently: "Gently Through the Mill" (Company Pictures, Element Pictures, All3 Media, GBH, PBS, 2009)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2026 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

I turned back to regular TV for an episode of the interesting 2007-2017 British TV policier Inspector George Gently, which I hadn’t realized when I watched last week’s quite impressive episode “Gently in the Blood,” originally aired January 4, 2009 that I’d actually seen before. I’d caught a few previous episodes in the mid-2010’s when they aired locally on KPBS closer to their original showings in Britain. After “Gently in the Blood” I was expecting great things for this week’s show, “Gently Through the Mill,” but I was a bit disappointed even though it was still entertaining in its own right. “Gently Through the Mill” begins with the death by hanging of mill manager Patrick Fuller (Joe Duttine) in the north of England. The mill produces flour, and for over 150 years it had been owned by the Fuller family. Then it fell on hard times economically, the Fullers didn’t have the capital to upgrade the equipment, and so Patrick Fuller was pressured into selling out. The buyer – though we’re not told this until halfway through the episode – was Labour politician Geoffrey Pershore (Tim McInnerny), who as the show opens is in the middle of a hard-fought campaign to unseat the local Member of Parliament, Conservative Nicholas Mundy (Trevor Cooper), who seems to regard the seat as his by matter of divine right. The election was just two days away when Fuller died, ostensibly by suicide, though of course Inspector George Gently (Martin Shaw) and his younger sidekick, detective sergeant John Bacchus (Lee Ingolby), suspect he was murdered because, among other things, he didn’t leave a suicide note. Writer Mick Ford, adapting a novel by Alan Hunter (creator of Gently and the other recurring characters), certainly created an ample suspect pool (something my husband Charles noticed even though he was working on a computerized class during the first half-hour and joined me only for the rest) and a dizzying array of potential motives.

It turns out that Patrick Fuller had been having an affair at work, not with his hot-shot 17-year-old secretary Julie (Kate Heppel), but with Mrs. Blythely (Anne Hornby), wife of his long-time best friend Henry Blythely (Nicholas Jones). Unfortunately, they’d been caught kissing in the mill by Sam Draper (Tom Goodman-Hill), who used his knowledge to blackmail Fuller into giving him the job of mill foreman over the younger and more qualified Jed Jimpson (Justin McDonald), who when he isn’t working at the mill is a firebrand for Geoffrey Pershore’s campaign. Midway through the episode Sam Draper’s dead body is found floating in the river after having been apparently struck with several blows to the skin. There’s also the issue of what happened to the petty-cash fund in Fuller’s office safe, which wasn’t found when his body was. Gently’s and Bacchus’s search for the killer reaches a dead end when it turns out that most of the principals, including Patrick Fuller himself, were Freemasons. Bacchus deduces that Masonry had something to do with the suspicious deaths, and when Gently tells him that the only people Masons will talk to about the events of the case are other Masons, Bacchus determines to join the local order and worm the secrets out of whoever he can meet through the lodge. We get some nice shots of Lee Ingolby wearing a shirt off the shoulder as part of the initiation ritual (generally Ingolby was the sexiest man in the cast of these productions, though here both Tom Goodman-Hill and Justin McDonald were giving him runs for the money in that department). As part of the ritual, Bacchus is blindfolded (which reminded me of Mozart’s opera The Magic Flute, which was written by two Masons, Mozart and librettist Emanuel Schikanader) and a dagger is first pressed to his open chest and then pushed across his throat, when he’s given the solemn warning that his throat will be slashed end to end if he ever reveals the secrets of Masonry to anyone outside the order.

At the Masonic ceremony Bacchus meets the man whose activities perpetrated the murder: Maurice Hilton (Alan McKenna), a food inspector who found that conditions at the local mill were unsafe. Hilton was about to issue a report condemning the mill as unsafe and ordering it to be shut down until all its equipment was replaced and sanitary safeguards were put in place. But Pershore, the supposed friend of the workers, bribed Hilton into suppressing his report, though Pershore kept the one copy as “insurance” should Hilton ever try to report him to the authorities. A bad batch of flour got released during the process and 19 people got food poisoning from it, including one who died. Meanwhile the Masons were working on behalf of Nicholas Mundy (ya remember Nicholas Mundy?), who was a Mason himself, to try to figure out Pershore’s dark, deadly secret and worm it out of him or his associates to destroy him politically. Ultimately it turns out [spoiler alert!] that Fuller’s death actually was a suicide, but Draper was murdered by Jed Jimpson when he threatened to expose both Pershore and Jimpson for having bribed the health inspector to let the unsafe mill stay open. Jimpson knocked Draper into a railing at a bridge over the river by the mill (the mill had been open so long it probably still ran on water power when it was first built), and he and Pershore pitched Draper’s body into the river so his death would appear to have been an accident. It gets even wilder from there; it turns out that the man who died from the food poisoning caused by Pershore’s refusal to close the mill (which he rationalized by saying he hadn’t wanted to put his workers out of their jobs while the mill was being modernized to be safe) was [double spoiler alert!] Jimpson’s father. Jimpson had rationalized his dad’s death some months before by attributing his liver failure to his long-term alcoholism, but the shock of realizing that his supposed mentor had actually killed his father, albeit indirectly, sends him into a murderous rage. He breaks open a bottle and is about to stab Pershore to death with it when Gently and Bacchus get the bottle out of Jimpson’s hand and arrest both him and Pershore. I should have known that Alan Hunter and Mick Ford would not only make Pershore literally “too good to be true” but reveal him as the villain at the end, and there’s a certain cynicism about politicians in general and politicians who masquerade as “friends of the people” when in fact they’re anything but that specifically.