Deadline

Deadline is the episode in which CBS's money troubles come to the surface, and its plot begins as an ordinary job. Ken is hired to follow Christine Pryall and to protect her from her nuisance husband, Jed. At first it looks like a straightforward case, the kind of work that might help pull the firm back from the brink of bankruptcy.

Then it starts to go wrong. Ken receives strange telephone calls in the middle of the night. He finds that the CBS office has been broken into and his records on the Pryall case stolen. He learns that Christine's home has been ransacked and that she is in hospital.

Only when the police step in do Ken and Harry understand how dangerous the job has become. A routine surveillance, sold to them as a protection assignment against a pest of a husband, has become something that people are prepared to break into offices and wreck houses for.

The cast gives the episode its weight. Clare Higgins plays Christine, Niall O'Brien plays Jed, and James Hazeldine plays DS Corrigan. It is also the last appearance of Benny Young as DS Hatchard, who has been Ken's policeman friend since the fourth series and has appeared at the end of several cases to vouch for him.

Tony Etchells wrote the episode, and Derek Banham, who also directed Love or Money, directs it. Saskia Wickham's Alex, who joined CBS at the start of the series, and Rocky are both in the cast, and the other credited roles, a scene-of-crime officer, a hospital sister and a receptionist, played by Mike Dowling, Christine Absalom and Joanna Wake, fit the police-and-hospital turn the story takes.

The setting matters. By the last series CBS is no longer the comfortable partnership of the fifth and sixth years. Harry's business ventures have always been a comic backdrop, but here the firm's financial position is part of the plot: Ken takes a job that looks easy because the company needs the fee.

That is a change from the series' usual pattern, in which the money is a joke, and it gives the case an edge of desperation. David Daker's Harry, whom the Guardian's obituary of the actor describes as a less than successful businessman, has by this point seen his hotels, ballroom and country club give way to the security firm that now carries both men.

IMDb users rate it the lowest of the series, though from only a handful of votes, and the outline stops at the discovery of the danger.

The outline has the shape of a thriller rather than a comedy: the nightly calls, the stolen files and the ransacked house all point the same way. That is unusual for a series that normally keeps its danger at arm's length, and it makes the episode worth seeing for anyone who wants to know how far the programme went in its last year.