Passion Fruit Fool

Alec Bailey, a dry cleaner, approaches Crabbe with a problem. His daughter has been abducted, and he is being pressed by the people holding her. The episode is one of the first series' more urgent instalments, and it moves between the kidnappers' demands and the restaurant's ordinary week.

The abduction is connected to a criminal named Crabbe, who is behind the pressure on Bailey. The case requires Crabbe to work out what the abductors actually want, which is not simply money, and the investigation's difficulty is that Bailey is too frightened to say what he knows. The episode's plot runs on the gap between what the police can be told and what is happening.

The restaurant strand continues in parallel, with the kitchen staff and Margaret keeping the place going while Crabbe is occupied. The series never lets the restaurant stop, and in an episode as tense as this one the contrast is deliberate: the ordinary business of serving food continues while a man's daughter is missing.

The resolution is not available in detail from the published record. The sources document the premise, the abduction and Crabbe's involvement, but not how the case is closed or what becomes of Bailey's daughter, and this article does not supply an ending the sources do not contain. What can be said is that the episode is resolved in the series' usual way, with Crabbe's understanding of the people involved rather than with force.

The guest cast places the episode among the better-cast of the first series. Jim Carter and Andy Serkis appear, and the billing gives them substantial parts rather than cameos. Both were by 1994 established performers, and their presence in a BBC Sunday-evening drama an hour long is a measure of the standing the series had from its first run.

For a viewer coming to the series now, this is one of the first-series episodes where the programme's undemonstrative competence is clearest. The abduction is treated seriously without being sensationalised, the police work is ordinary and methodical, and the kitchen is still the place the detective would rather be.

It is also the episode in which the series' guest casting is at its most striking: a future Oscar nominee and a future writer of Downton Abbey in the same billing, both playing small parts, in the fourth week of a new Sunday-night drama. For a series that had only just begun, the confidence of the construction is striking: the abduction is treated as a serious matter throughout, and the resolution arrives the way the series always prefers, through an understanding of the people involved rather than through force.