The Blind Man

An anonymous caller tells Rockliffe that a blind farmer is going to be murdered, and the man who looks after him wants to marry the woman who owns the neighbouring land. The episode is the run's inheritance story and it is the only one its producer directed himself.

Ted Treherne cares for his blind brother Herbie on an isolated farm at Bantry Wharton. Telephone calls arrive warning that Herbie's life is in danger, and Ted's plans have changed: he intends to marry May Gilbert, a wealthy landowner. The episode asks the question its premise invites and leaves it standing: whether the brother who has given his life to caring for the blind man now has a reason to want him gone. IMDb's credits settle the names behind the familiar forms, with David Beames as Edward Treherne and John Vine as Herbert Treherne.

The second strand is domestic, and it is late. Rockliffe's daughter wants to meet his new girlfriend, and the episode is the one where the private life the series had promised since its third week finally arrives on screen. Denise Martill is credited as Kathleen Rockliffe, and this is the only appearance the character makes in the run.

Ron Craddock produced all seven episodes and directed this one, making it the single episode of the series with the same name above and below the line. John Foster wrote it, and no biography or further television credit for him could be established, which is typical of this run's supporting paperwork.

The episode's shape is the rural version of the parent series' methods. Where the London shows opened with violence and worked backwards, this one opens with a warning and waits: nothing has happened, and the question is whether anything will. Ian Hogg plays a detective who has learned in a few months of county work to take a telephone call seriously, because in Wessex the nearest help may be twenty minutes away and the person making the threat may be the only person in the house with the victim.

Carole Nimmons' Rachel Osborne and James Aubrey's DI Hoskins are both present, giving the office its fuller shape, while Ian Brimble and Aaron Harris are absent. By this point in the run the ensemble has settled into a rotation, with the detective sergeant at the centre and the uniformed officers around him.

Land and duty are the themes, and they are the same themes as the first and last episodes. A farm, a marriage, an inheritance and a brother: the show's argument in its final weeks is that in a county, property is the motive for nearly everything.

Nobody recorded how the episode ends, and the question it asks is unanswerable from the surviving material. That the strongest episode in the run in terms of story may also be the one with the least documentation is worth saying out loud: the show was not repeated after 1990, has no DVD release, and exists for a modern viewer as a set of premises, credits and dates.