The Fall and Rise of the Bowman Empire

The Fall and Rise of the Bowman Empire is about a man everyone assumes is guilty. Elspeth Bowman, who keeps a local shop, asks Ken to keep an eye on her son, Cecil, who is about to come out of prison. She is worried about his friends. Two of them, Arthur Mitchell and David Kelloway, old comrades from the Territorial Army, want to throw him a welcome-home party at the Plaza Suite.

Cecil turns out to be a genial, long-haired man in middle age who suddenly has a great deal of money and spends it freely on new cars. The natural assumption is that it is the loot from the robbery he went to prison for. He never named his accomplices, but the police are almost certain they were Mitchell and Kelloway.

The money is innocent. Cecil had a win on the premium bonds and put it in a unit trust. And his friends are planning another job. At the party they tell him about a robbery at Stansfield Hall, a stately home. They already have photographs of the outside, and Cecil goes on a guided tour during an open day to memorise where the valuable pieces are.

But Cecil is not rejoining his old gang. He is working with the police, and the robbery is his chance to see Mitchell and Kelloway caught, revenge for leaving him to take the blame last time. The man Ken was hired to watch has been running his own operation all along.

Rocky, meanwhile, has been dumped by a girl he has just met and wants more stimulating work. Ken and Margaret set him a test of observation: he must learn to remember forty objects on a tray. With coaching from Margaret's daughter, Jo, he gets there. Harry's problem is mice.

The Plaza Suite is overrun and has to close for cleaning, and a man from the Society of Beleaguered Husbands, Simon Dangerflower, uses the empty ballroom to lay out a vast domino display for the television cameras. A mouse knocks it down before the cameras are ready.

Douglas Watkinson wrote the script and Bruce MacDonald directs. Patricia Hayes plays Elspeth and Richard O'Callaghan plays Cecil, with Michael Attwell and Berwick Kaler as his old friends.

The episode's pleasure is in the reversal. The audience is invited to share the police's suspicion of Cecil, and the story gradually reveals that he is cleverer than any of them. The title tells the same story: a family brought down by a prison sentence, rising again through the son's own scheme.

The weakness is that Ken has little to do. The case is Cecil's, and BDI's detectives are largely spectators to a plan they did not devise. The subplots are slight, though the mouse and the dominoes make a good visual joke.

For the penultimate episode of the Birmingham years, it is a modest but likeable hour, and Rocky's tray of forty objects is a small sign of his ambition to be more than the firm's comic relief.