Passage Hawk

Ben Hutchins comes home to England in custody, a bank robber released from a South African jail because he is supposedly dying of cancer. That's the story, anyway. The moment he lands he tries to slip away from his escort, Kerber, and give Maggie Forbes and Nigel the slip as well, which suggests his health is not quite the problem everyone was told.

The EYES team checks him out and finds the truth: Hutchins is perfectly healthy, and the dying man act was a way to get him back to British soil. Kerber, who is a well-known assassin, has his own plans for the trip. He is arranging a funeral, and four prominent black African leaders will be attending it. The whole point of bringing Hutchins home was to turn that funeral into something else. The idea that the extradition was staged around a funeral gives the plot a properly cold shape.

Barry Appleton wrote it and Anthony Simmons directed. John McEnery's Hutchins is a weary, watchful centre to the story, with Ian McNeice as Kerber, David Cardy as the Customs Man, Jessica Carney as the Press Woman, Andrew Readman as the Press Man and Rolf Saxon as a Pop Star, with Jill Gascoine's Maggie, Don Warrington's Nigel, Leslie Ash's Fred and Tracy-Louise Ward's Tessa in support. It went out in May 1986, when South Africa was all over the news and the anti-apartheid movement was at its height, which gives the funeral plot a weight it would not carry today.

The premise is a good one, a con that gets complicated the moment real killers get involved, and the show plays it with a straight face. But Kerber's cheerful professionalism is the best thing in it, a man who plans murders the way other people plan dinner parties. The show rarely does political assassination plots, and it is a shame, because the planning here is the best part of the story.