Honourable Service

Honourable Service sends Ken back to the fire brigade, and to the night that ended his career there. Margaret and Jo are away on holiday, so Ken is running Boon-Daly Investigations on his own when he goes to the retirement party of Ron Blisset, a former colleague. The occasion brings back painful memories of the fire in which his lungs were damaged.

After the party, Ron's wife, Maureen, asks Ken for help. Their son Pete is a fireman too, or was. His best friend, Mack, was badly hurt in a fire, and since then Pete has left the brigade and vanished. Maureen wants to know why.

Ken talks to Mack and to another friend, Paul, and comes away sure that both are holding something back. When he finds Pete, the truth comes out. Pete knew that the fire which injured Mack had been started deliberately, and he knew who had started it: Paul, a fireman turned arsonist, setting fires for money.

For Ken and Harry, both ex-firemen, the idea of a colleague setting fires is an offence against everything they served, and they decide to trap him. Harry hires Paul to set fire to the Plaza Suite. Mack shows Paul how to build a cheap incendiary that will leave no trace. Ken installs a security camera to record the attempt.

The trap works in a way nobody planned. As Paul sets up the device in the ballroom, he drops it and sets himself on fire, and it falls to Ken, the man whose lungs were ruined by going into a burning building, to go in and save him.

Harry, meanwhile, is hosting a confidence course called Success Through Confidence, run by Denise Appleby. He joins in and, in a role-play, demolishes the interviewer so thoroughly that he clearly needs no training. With his new assurance he asks Denise to dinner, and the evening does not go as he hopes.

Richard LeParmentier and Paddy Fletcher wrote the script and Sarah Hellings directs. Lloyd Owen plays Pete, Gary Webster plays Paul, and Geoffrey Church plays Mack.

The episode's strength is personal. The series began with Ken losing his place in the brigade, and here he and Harry defend its honour against one of its own, which gives the case a weight the series' usual clients do not. The climax, Ken rescuing the man who betrayed the service, is its best scene on paper, and it repeats the act that cost him his career.

The weakness is in the plotting of the trap. The arsonist is caught not by evidence but by his own clumsiness, and the security camera that was supposed to provide proof is overtaken by an accident. But as a story about loyalty, and about what the two men still owe the job they left, it is one of the more serious hours in the third series.