Private Ear

Sarah Marshall is a young woman working as a prostitute in Bristol and she is trying to see David Carn. Carn is a middle-of-the-road disc jockey at Radio West, the city's commercial station, and he will not see her. She steals his Rolls-Royce, drives to the coast, and kills herself with drink and pills. Her body is found beside the car the following morning.

What follows is a chain of small details rather than a murder inquiry. Don Satchley, who runs the station, wants it established that Carn had nothing to do with her. Erica Bayliss, a barrister who is also Shoestring's landlady, has been booked for a legal phone-in, and when Satchley puts the problem to her she offers to introduce her tenant, a private investigator with no money and almost no work. Eddie works outward from the ordinary: the owner of a 1920s-themed disco identifies Sarah from a health club, her address book carries the name of the taxi firm she used, and the firm's records lead him to a group of Bristol businessmen who use the club and who warn him off. The company behind them turns out to belong to the man running the prostitution, who is also Sarah's father and was her last client.

Carn admits he had been having an affair with her. Eddie, having cleared him, agrees to keep the admission quiet. Carn resigns, and the vacated slot is offered to Eddie as a weekly phone-in in which listeners bring him their problems. He becomes Radio West's Private Ear, which is the format the rest of the run rests on.

Trevor Eve had the harder job here than anywhere later in the run, because the character had to be introduced with his history intact and his present condition visible. Eddie is a man who had a breakdown while working in computers, is frightened of the technology he used to work with, and is good at the job and plainly unwell between cases. Eve plays the intelligence and the nerves as the same quality rather than as two. William Russell, as Carn, carries the episode's central irony: a former actor and 1950s matinee idol who is guilty of something and innocent of the charge, playing the vanity and the relief together.

The format is established without a single scene of exposition about who anyone is. The station arrives as a workplace before it arrives as a premise, and the four regulars are on their feet and working inside the hour. What lets it down is the ending, which depends on a coincidence of parentage and asks a great deal of a character the audience meets only in the scene that reveals him. Opening on failure and displacement rather than on a crime was the right decision; it gave the series a reason to exist beyond its own personnel.

The episode went out in the middle of the 1979 ITV strike, against no competition, and took 18.7 million viewers on the BBC's figures and 19.5 million on AGB's. The next morning the Telegraph called it "a promising debut" and the Mail found Eve "an oddly watchable actor, whose uncaring appearance disguises a firm sense of justice". Both were right about the part and neither could have known the show would be nominated for a BAFTA as best drama series, the first detective thriller to be.