Love Byte

A self-made entrepreneur walks into the unit with a father's worry: his young daughter has got involved with an ex-convict, and he wants someone to watch the man. Fred Smith takes the job, and the watching turns up more than anyone expected. The ex-con is the least of it. The real operation is a blackmail sideline run by the entrepreneur's own second in command, fed by clients' personal details held on the organisation's central computer.

For 1985 that was a properly nasty idea: the machine that runs the business quietly keeping the files that ruin people. The episode treats the computer as what it was, a filing cabinet with ambition, and the menace comes from the people reading the files, not the machine itself. The daughter's romance, which starts the whole thing, is almost forgotten by the end, which is the episode's way of showing how much the case grew.

Ben Steed wrote it and James Hill directed. Leslie Ash's Fred works the case, with George Sewell as Charlie Hammond, Pete Lee-Wilson as Steve Dermot, Brian Coburn as Butler, Geraldine Gardner as Gloria, Sally Jane Jackson as Kate Hammond and Nick Maloney as Dyson, with Jill Gascoine's Maggie, Rosalyn Landor's Pru and Don Warrington's Nigel around the edges. It went out in June 1985, late in the first series. Ben Steed, who wrote it, was a veteran of The Avengers, which explains the episode's fondness for a neat idea with a nasty edge. George Sewell, one of the most reliable faces in British television, adds weight to Charlie Hammond.

The title is a pun the show can't resist. But the story underneath is sour: the people who know everything about you are the ones you trusted. Fred catches them, but the episode leaves you with the feeling that the next company will do the same thing with better software. The lesson is old and new at once: the files were always the danger, and the machine just made them easier to read.