Much as I want to like this series (and in the performances of Maigret and Lucas there is much to like) episodes like this one don't make it easy.
Simenon's story is dark, dealing with personal misery, class conflict, family feuds, and ramifications of the war. Or at least that seems to be what he wanted to appear to be doing. Actually he was stringing out a meagre plot by affecting to be a cross between Poe and Dostoevsky.
Putting all that on screen within the technical limitations of 1963 TV was never to going to be a great success and so we have the set designer's attempt at gloomy, unhappy, gothic, aristocratic mansions combining with the lighting designer's need to avoid viewers of the 405-line output ringing the BBC to complain that the picture had gone ( a real and documented fear that underlaid approaches to studio lighting at the time ) resulting in something akin to an Ideal Home Exhibition stand using candles in a power cut while, as usual, the residences of the lower orders come across as a telephone box being used as a store room for a junk shop.
However all of the above does not excuse the lame attempts by director and actors to do angst which pretty much amount just to doing slow. Performances of the low standard on view in this episode hark back to the dire offerings of Series 1 which are much less common in Series 2 and Series 3. Alan Rowe as Alain Vernoux gives us a particularly embarrassing audition-style turn that surely would never have got him into RADA and the non-hidden choreography of the angry mob in the studio scenes suggests that the director fancies doing updated Greek tragedy at the Royal Court.
As the series progresses, one significant improvement is the increased and better use of film for location scenes but here some quite bizarre things go on in film inserts depicting a mob in the town square who manhandle cars from A to (not far away) B to no apparent purpose and courteously let the occupants get out for a chat.
Definitely one for the Jukebox Jury klaxon.