Best Left Buried

Best Left Buried puts CBS itself under attack. The firm has a contract to guard a derelict church that a local builder, Donald Bannerman, is about to demolish and replace with luxury flats. During a storm the ground moves and some ancient statues are uncovered. An archaeologist from the university, Dr Freda Butler, says they date from a Cistercian monastery on the site and insists on access. Bannerman refuses, but Ken decides to let her take a quick look while Bannerman is away.

That night one of Bannerman's JCBs is sabotaged with sand in the fuel tank, and Freda and her students are blamed. Bannerman threatens to move all his security work to Jack Fentiman, one of Harry's rivals. Harry wants to sack the guard who was on duty, Frank. Ken takes pity on him, since he is the rather simple brother of another CBS guard, Bertie, and gives him another chance. The next night the church is flooded after Frank turns on a water valve.

Bannerman carries out his threat. The reputation of CBS suffers, and other clients begin to cancel. Ken reluctantly sacks Frank but suspects someone is paying him. He follows him to a pub, where he sees Frank with DS McKinley, a policeman who is also Fentiman's security consultant, and overhears Frank asking for more money. Later he finds that Frank has been beaten up. Frank admits the sabotage: Fentiman and McKinley were threatening to tell Harry that he had been dismissed from a previous job for running amok on a fork-lift truck.

Harry and Ken decide to trap them. After consulting DS Hatchard, they try entrapment. Bertie tells Fentiman that CBS will go out of business if anything else damages its reputation, and suggests that Fentiman and McKinley plant a consignment of stolen video recorders in the CBS warehouse. Bertie lets them in. The police storm the building and arrest Fentiman, but McKinley gets away.

Feeling foolish, Bannerman gives CBS the contract back and agrees to delay the work on the church for three months so Freda can finish her investigation. McKinley goes to the church to take revenge, but Frank arrives and knocks him out, and Ken and Harry give him his job back.

Rocky has fallen for Trisha Downey, a chirpy snooker player from Lancashire who tempts local players to raise their stakes by playing badly and then wins. He gets her into a competition and makes sure the talent scout Mickey Tucker is there, and Tucker signs her. The snooker player Willie Thorne appears as himself.

Paddy Fletcher and Richard LeParmentier wrote the script and Matthew Evans directs.

The strength is the entrapment. Bertie, the brother of the man who was forced to sabotage, becomes the means of catching those who forced him. The weakness is a crowded plot: the church, the sabotage and the snooker hustler fit together only loosely. It is still the strongest showing so far for CBS as a business, and a rare episode in which Frank, a minor figure, gets to hit the villain himself.