Blind Eye

Charlie Wilson, an old lag with something urgent to say, wants a private word with Gordon Spikings. The moment his little boy is snatched in the park he shuts up tight, and whatever he came to say stays unsaid. Spikings, for his part, has his own morning to deal with: a briefcase rigged with explosives finds him on the tube. Two crises, one domestic and one very much public, and neither of them gives Spikings a moment's peace.

Jesse Carr-Martindale wrote it, Tony Wharmby directed, and the episode is that rare thing, a Dempsey and Makepeace that puts Spikings at the centre of the danger while the leads do the running. Ray Smith gets some of his best material of the season here, a man whose authority is being tested from two directions at once, and who keeps his temper with the effort of a man holding a door shut. The episode went out on 1 March 1985, in the first series' spring run. Michael Brandon and Glynis Barber, who married in real life in 1989, spend this one mostly on the chase while Spikings carries the anxiety. It is proof the show could build an hour around the supporting cast and still be itself.

Desmond McNamara's Charlie Wilson does the haunted prisoner bit well, and the family side is played straight: Jacquie-Ann Carr as Eileen Wilson, Matthew Long as Prison Officer Edwards, Desmond Jordan as the Prison Governor. William Simons's Tennant and Roger Booth's Jack fill the institutional corners, and Little Charlie is played by Rufus Carr-Martindale, whose surname matches the writer's, a coincidence the episode never explains. Roy Alon, Chris Webb and Peter Spraggon drop in as guests.

And it is a tense, domestic-feeling hour, all the more unsettling for being built around a child in danger. The bomb on the tube is the flashy bit. It is the boy in the park that stays with you.