Unto Us Four a Son

Child-minding is not what Ken had in mind when Harry placed the advertisement, but Unto Us Four a Son puts him in charge of a boy who needs more than minding. Laurie Langley, a pop singer whose career is behind her, hires Ken to look after her son Daniel. She is afraid that her ex-husband, Geoff Greenaway, means to kidnap him.

Daniel is not easy company, and the job looks at first like a domestic dispute with Ken as an expensive babysitter. Then the boy is attacked outside his school, and it becomes clear that the threat is not only from inside the family. A criminal gang has been targeting him.

That widens the field of suspicion. There is the mother, whose fears may or may not be justified. There is the estranged father, played by Warren Clarke, who is the obvious suspect because she has named him. And there is a stranger called Cormack who has been seen following Daniel, whose connection with the family Ken sets out to discover.

The episode belongs to a type the series used often: a client brings Ken a private quarrel, and the quarrel turns out to be covering something more dangerous. It also gives Ken his first job as a minder, the role that later became one of the pillars of the programme, from bodyguarding spies to escorting footballers.

Guy Meredith wrote the script, and Laurence Moody directs again. The regulars at The Grand are in place, with Gordon Warnecke's Hanif now on the staff, but the weight of the hour falls on the guests. Clarke, who has a page on this site, brings a familiar face to a part that depends on the audience not being sure what he is.

The set-up is well made. George Irving plays Cormack, and John Carlin appears as Ted Michaels. Three possible threats circle one child, and Ken, who has no training for this sort of work, has to decide which of them to believe.

The title reworks the Christmas line about a child being born, and its extra word does a lot of work: four parties have a stake in this son, and not all of them mean him well.

The episode is not one of the series' best known, but it shows Boon testing how far its odd-jobs premise could stretch, and finding that it stretched as far as kidnap without losing its easy humour. It is also the second episode in five to draw on the fringes of the pop business, after the promoter who hired Ken in Box 13.