A Once Fluid Man

A Once Fluid Man ends the second series with a gunshot. It begins, though, as comedy. Ken runs into Margaret Daly again at an aerobics class, and Harry, low and restless, has decided to sell the Coaching Inn. He arranges a blind date through the lonely hearts column of the local paper and is mortified to find that his date is Margaret, who is researching the male menopause for a psychology degree.

The sale is no joke to Ken. Texas Rangers works from the hotel's stables and Ken lives above them, and he accuses Harry of not caring that both will be homeless. Harry goes ahead anyway, and makes a handsome profit.

Then an old friend from the fire brigade, Terry Brent, checks in. He says he is a successful pop-group manager. When Rocky delivers a package to the group's lead singer, Glob, he finds that the band has never heard of him.

The truth is darker. Terry has spent the past few years in a mental hospital, suffering from schizophrenia, and he resents Ken and Harry for having made a success of their lives since leaving the brigade. He takes them hostage at gunpoint in a hotel bedroom.

Police marksmen surround the building. A shot is fired. Against the orders of a senior officer, Margaret runs up the fire escape and into the room, where Harry cries out that Ken has been shot and he thinks he is dead. The series ends there.

Billy Hamon, who also wrote A Ride on the Wild Side, provides the script, and Ken Hannam directs. Anthony May plays Terry. The episode marks the last appearance of Lesley-Anne Sharpe as Debbie, and it changes Margaret's life as well as Ken's: her dash up the fire escape costs her a disciplinary hearing, and by the next series she has left the police.

The title is a pun on a fireman's past. Terry, Ken and Harry were all once men of the fire brigade, and the episode's subject is what became of them afterwards. Ken and Harry built businesses. Terry did not, and his envy is the danger in the room.

The strength of the episode is its turn. Boon had always been a comfortable programme, and to end a series with its hero apparently dead was a bold choice. The DVDCompare review of the third series begins by recalling this ending, and the next series opens with Ken recovering from his wounds.

The weakness is the portrayal of mental illness. Terry's schizophrenia is offered as the explanation for his violence, in a way that belongs to the television of the 1980s and would be handled differently now. The blind-date comedy that precedes it also sits oddly beside a hostage siege.

But as a series finale it does what it should. It closes the Coaching Inn, sends Debbie away and, through Margaret's rescue, sets up the partnership that gives the third series its shape.