Blue For Danger

Mrs Driscoll wants her husband followed. It is the most ordinary request in the private investigation business, the sort of job you give the newest person in the office, and the episode lets you think that for a while. Then the tail goes wrong in ways that have nothing to do with infidelity, and the case turns into the most dangerous one the unit has ever handled.

Maggie Forbes is the one who goes deepest. The adversary she finds there is ruthless and patient, the kind of villain who doesn't threaten so much as arrange, and the show gives him the space to be properly frightening. The tailing job gives way to something with shadows in it, and the episode is patient about getting there. What starts as a domestic snoop ends with lives genuinely at stake, and the journey between the two is the episode's best trick. It earns its billing as the unit's most perilous case without ever telling you to be scared, which is the better way.

Jeremy Burnham wrote it and Tom Clegg directed. Jill Gascoine's Maggie carries the danger, with Nicholas Day as Fairbrother, George Innes as Driscoll, Alfred Molina as Det. Sgt. Cropper, Bridget Turner as Mrs Driscoll, Benny Young as Det. Insp. Rathbone and Preston Lockwood as Sir William, with Rosalyn Landor's Pru, Leslie Ash's Fred and Don Warrington's Nigel around the edges. It went out at the end of June 1985, closing the first series. Tom Clegg, who directed, would later be the steady hand behind much of Sharpe, and he handles the unit's most dangerous case without raising the volume.

It is a good note to end the first series on: the ordinary request that isn't. The regulars get some of their best reactions of the run, watching the case slip out of their hands and into deep water. And the episode also gives you a young Alfred Molina as Det. Sgt. Cropper, which is the sort of casting that looks better with every passing year.