Box 13

Boon begins by taking away the one thing its hero was sure of. Ken Boon is a West Midlands fireman who goes into a burning house without breathing apparatus to bring out a trapped child. He saves the boy, but the smoke damages his lungs for good, and after he collapses during a practice exercise he is declared unfit for duty. The brigade has no further use for him.

His old colleague Harry Crawford has already gone, taking early retirement to run a bar in Spain. When Harry's wife leaves him for a hairdresser he comes home, buys a run-down Birmingham hotel called The Grand, and finds Ken living in a caravan on a plot of land he has named the Ponderosa, trying to make a living from a market garden and slipping into debt.

Harry's solution is characteristic. He suggests that Ken take on odd jobs to keep the garden going, and when Ken objects he places an advertisement on his behalf anyway: Ex-fireman seeks interesting work. Anything legal considered. The phrase was the series' working title, and it states the rule the programme keeps for seven years. Ken will take almost any job, provided it is within the law.

The first client is Barney Spitz, a pop promoter played by John Sessions, who wants Ken to put on an old fireman's uniform and appear in a video as a publicity stunt for his band. It is a gentle start, and a pointed one. The uniform Ken has just lost becomes a costume for somebody else's promotion.

Jim Hill and Bill Stair wrote the opening episode themselves, and Laurence Moody, who directed nine episodes of the series, sets the visual habit early. The first series mixes location film with interiors videotaped at Central's studio in Broad Street, and its title sequence has Ken reading a Western comic strip called White Lightning, imagining himself as its hero and riding into Birmingham on the motorbike he names after it.

The Western idea goes deeper than the titles. Hill and Stair took the hero's name from Richard Boone, star of Have Gun - Will Travel, in which a hired troubleshooter answers calls for help. As Hill later put it, they dropped the E. Jim Diamond's theme song, Hi Ho Silver, made the connection explicit and became a top ten hit in 1986.

The episode also introduces the household at The Grand, with Rachel Davies as Doreen Evans, Joan Scott as Ethel Allard and Bill Gavin as Nick. As a case, the Spitz job is slight, and the real business of the hour is the set-up rather than the work. But as a statement of what the programme is, it is complete: an injured man with a motorbike, a friend with more schemes than sense, and an advert that promises anything legal. It remains the right place to start.