Series 7 of the ITV programme Foyle's War first aired in 2013, beginning Sunday 24 March. Comprising three episodes, the events in this season take place in August and September 1946.
Foyle returns from a trip to the US, where he pursued former industrialist and subsequently senator Howard Paige ("Fifty Ships"). Paige committed suicide, allegedly after being hounded by Foyle, although Foyle was unaware of Paige's death. The episode reintroduces the recurring character of Hilda Pierce, played by Ellie Haddington ("War Games", "The French Drop" and "All Clear"), turning her into a regular MI5 character with Foyle as one of her operatives. It also introduces the regular character of Arthur Valentine, another MI5 operative played by Tim McMullan.
The episode reintroduces Adam Wainwright, now Stewart's husband, as a Labour candidate in a forthcoming parliamentary by-election, though he is played by a new actor (Daniel Weyman, as opposed to Max Brown previously). Sergeant Frank Shaw, a former Hastings constable and POW, struggles as he returns from Singapore to a family and reality that have changed and evolved in the six years he was absent.
The episode begins with the 16 July 1945 Trinity nuclear test in New Mexico, USA, and is framed within the rising mistrust of the developing Cold War between the West and the Soviets. The nuclear scientists portrayed in the episode, Dr. Max Hoffman and Prof. Michael Fraser, are loosely based on John von Neumann and Klaus Fuchs, respectively.
Adam Wainwright, with the support of his wife, wins the West Peckham by-election as a Labour Party candidate.
Much of this story is loosely based on the real "Tin Eye", Lieutenant Colonel Robin Stephens, who ran Camp 020, an interrogation centre near London during the Second World War. References are also made in the episode to housing and food shortages, food rationing, the Lend-Lease programme and abuses of the Official Secrets Act. Women's multi-style coupon buster shoes, fashionable at the time, also serve as a plot point as does Dr Ian Ross' tick-borne tropical disease research.
Foyle's personal life is not addressed in this episode, apart from his increasing work collaboration with Valentine. Much of the character focus in the episodes of this series centres on the developing personal lives of Sam Wainwright, news of her pregnancy, and the evolving political career of her husband. Adam Wainwright, now a PPS. He exposes a politically influenced land overvaluation, leading to the resignation of his minister from parliament (cf. the Crichel Down affair).
The film is based on the massacre of 26 US soldiers known as "Operation Sonnenblume (Sunflower)". The actual Operation Sonnenblume happened in North Africa in 1941, but the incident has similarities with the later Malmedy massacre in Belgium. In August 1944, an important battle within the wider Normandy Campaign took place at Mortain â the village with the sunflower farm referred to in the episode - part of the eventual allied successes in the Falaise Pocket. In the show, the Americans attempt to pressure MI5 into handing over Strasser by threatening the 1943 BRUSA Agreement and loan terms that the US has extended to the UK.
Series Seven was broadcast in the United States on PBS stations on Masterpiece Mystery! as Foyle's War VII on 15, 22 and 29 September 2013, and on Netflix as of April 2014. In Australia it was on ABC weekly from 5 January 2014.