Fools Rush In

The second episode of Boon brings its case to the front desk. Late one night a dishevelled Irishman arrives at The Grand and insists on a room. Days later he is still there, and Harry, who likes his guests to be predictable, asks Ken to find out who he is. The answer is that the man does not know himself.

He has concussion after an accident and cannot remember his own name. He also has a large bundle of banknotes and no idea where it came from. Ken, a former fireman who has been in the odd-jobs business for one episode, finds himself with a missing-persons inquiry in which the missing person is sitting in front of him.

The money soon draws attention. Tom McGeary, a crooked local car dealer played by Gregor Fisher, arrives with two heavies and wants it back. That gives the episode a second question alongside the first: not only who the stranger is, but what he has done to make a man like McGeary come looking for him. Ken learns that the man is known as Frank Warren and starts to work back through his past.

Stephen Rea plays the stranger, and the casting tells its own story about the programme. From its second week Boon was attracting guest actors of standing, a habit that later made its cast lists read like a directory of British television. Here, a well-known actor carries a character who has to be interesting while knowing nothing about himself.

Ken has troubles of his own. He has fallen behind on the payments for his caravan and is trying to stop it being repossessed. It is a small strand, but it keeps faith with the opening episode. Ken has not taken up odd jobs as an adventure. He needs the money, and the Ponderosa is still a debt as much as a home.

Jim Hill and Bill Stair wrote this one as well as the pilot, and Ian Knox, who directed three of the first six episodes, handles it. The title is apt: fools rush in, and Ken has rushed into a stranger's trouble with no method beyond turning up and asking questions.

The premise is one of the strongest in the first series. An amnesiac with a bag of money is a classic thriller device, and Boon puts it in a cheap Birmingham hotel with a decent man who has no idea how private detectives are supposed to work.

That mismatch between the job and the man doing it is the series in small, and it is here early. The weakness is that the hook is stronger than anything around it: the caravan debt and the hotel scenes are thin beside the mystery of who Frank Warren is.