Rival Eyes

Rival Eyes has two plots about people hurting one another over very different stakes. In the first, Harry has moved to the village of Upper Ridley, with Rocky lodging in his house. They help a young widow, Sylvia Clayborough, who has taken over her husband's fishmongering business and whose van keeps being vandalised, its tyres let down and graffiti sprayed on it.

Then Sylvia and another widow, Vivienne Blake, start competing to welcome Harry to the village, and he realises that he has landed in a hotbed of rivalry. The vandal turns out to be Vivienne's wayward nephew.

Ken's case is darker. Thomas O'Rourke, an Irish builder, asks him to find out who broke into his office and stole cash. He blames a rival builder, Brian Jonson, and treats it as a quarrel between a Catholic and a Protestant, and even tries to settle it by demolishing Jonson's office with a JCB. His daughter Caitlin thinks the real thief is her older sister, Bernadette, who has gone a bit wild and sings in a band at an Irish pub.

Ken sees Bernadette waving a lot of cash at the pub and follows her to a derelict house, where she is squatting with her boyfriend, Shane, and looking after a baby. She tells him that her father threw her out when he found she was pregnant by Brian. She stole the money because he will not contribute to his grandchild's keep. As usual, Ken is caught between his duty to the client and his conscience, and he cares too much to give her away.

Brian fights Shane at the pub. Bernadette loves them both, and Shane loses patience when he sees she is still carrying a torch for Brian. She and Brian talk, and find each had believed the other had left. They are about to get back together when she learns that her father told Brian that she had had an abortion and did not want to see him again.

It is the last straw. She sets fire to her father's office, not knowing that he is asleep inside. Ken and Harry rescue him. Ken goes to Bernadette's house and waits with her for the police, asking them to be gentle: she did not mean to hurt her father.

Peter Mann wrote the script from a story by Guy Meredith, and Gareth Davies directs. James Ellis plays O'Rourke and Emer McCourt plays Bernadette, singing the ballad She Moved Through the Fair.

The strength is Bernadette. The episode sets out her reasons, a baby, a lie and a father's cruelty, and then allows the fire to be an accident, so that Ken's plea is a plea for justice rather than for pardon. It is among the more serious hours of the fifth series.

Harry's village comedy is lighter and has no bearing on the main case. That is its weakness, but it makes a useful contrast: the village feuds over a welcome, and the family feud ends with a fire.