Come Out Fighting

"Come Out Fighting", broadcast on New Year's Eve 1983, is the third series' most populated hour — a boxing story with a full cast of fighters, trainers and promoters, and a mystery at its centre: one of the boxers in a European championship match is being plagued by a series of mishaps. The champion, Jacques Laronde, has already killed one opponent; the challenger, Eddie McCord, was badly cut by a headbutt in their last meeting; and as the fight approaches, the accidents begin — a venue with no workers, a stolen medallion, a suspicious press photographer.

Alistair Bell's script is interested in the world of the fight game: the managers, the money, the promoters and the small cruelties of a sport where a man's body is the product. Robert Young directs with a brisk, event-driven pace that suits the material, and the cast — Gary Webster as McCord, Brian Croucher and the rest of the fight crowd — gives the tournament a convincing texture. Bergerac works through the boxing world the way he works through any closed community: following the money, the grudges and the people who benefit from a fighter's setbacks.

The episode is at its best when it lets the sport and the mystery share the screen. The mishaps — the stalled venue, the sabotage, the intimidation of McCord's wife Donna — accumulate into a clear pattern, and the question is not whether someone is interfering but who is paying for it. The fight itself, when it comes, is staged with the right brutal economy, and the resolution is the kind of small, human conclusion the series favoured: not a mastermind but a man with a grudge.

It is a competent, populous hour that varies the third series' texture through its cast size and setting. The boxing frame gives it a contained world with its own rules and resentments, and Bergerac moves through it with his usual mixture of charm and persistence. A reasonable mid-season entry, and a reminder that the series could stage an event-based story as readily as a two-hander.