I'm a Believer

Maddy Hopkins is approached by her mother in Bristol city centre while she is trying to sell records connected with the Starshine movement, a religious group she has joined. Maddy refuses to have anything to do with her and leaves with the other Starshiners, who reject material possessions. Her mother tells Eddie that her daughter turns twenty-one shortly, at which point her trust fund becomes available, and that she is afraid the group is waiting for the money.

Eddie tries to speak to Maddy during another selling session and comes away only with a copy of the record, which he takes to one of the station's disc jockeys. The disc jockey identifies the label, and Eddie asks him to invite some of the Starshiners onto his programme for an interview, which gives him access to the group's own account of themselves. Radio West's newsroom is working against him: the head of news has been listening to Eddie's confidential tapes hoping to find a story and sets the reporter Felicity Lamb to follow him. Eddie traces the record label to its owner, an American called Jim Huckle, and finds the studio on a boat. Huckle gives him nothing. He visits the Starshiners at one of the properties they are renovating and Maddy shows him around, but he is unconvinced, and an estate agent confirms that a property was bought by what the paperwork describes as a charitable organisation. Listening to the Starshine interview on Erica's radio, he hears the group plan a retreat at a country house and hears Maddy and another member talk about their guru, Stephen Steele, who is said to be at the South Pole. Eddie goes back to the estate agent for contact names and is set upon in the dark by two men, one of them Huckle. He traces Steele to the retreat and finds him in an attic, meditating: an urbane, elderly man. Returning to the retreat, unaware that Felicity has followed him, he finds the group being lectured by Huckle's secretary. Two Starshiners spot Felicity and throw her out, and Eddie with her.

In a pub nearby Eddie notices Huckle's car and follows it to an expensive mansion, which turns out to be Steele's real home. After a further visit to the retreat during which two men try to attack him, Eddie and Felicity persuade the rest of the group that Steele has been taking their savings and their unemployment benefit while profiting from the properties they renovate and the records they sell. The Starshiners go to the mansion, and Eddie conducts an auction of the guru's possessions which raises about five pounds. Don Satchley ends the episode with a party at the station.

The episode is a confidence trick played on people who have already lost most of what they have. The Starshiners give up their belongings and hand over their benefit and their savings to renovate property that appreciates in value for the man at the top, and the guru is not at the South Pole but in an attic at the retreat and a mansion in the same county. Jeananne Crowley's Felicity is the guest part the episode is built around: a reporter who follows Eddie without telling him, causes problems in the middle of the case and then becomes an ally, and the only character in the first series representing a part of the station that competes with Eddie rather than supporting him. The newsroom's brief appearance is the only time in the run the station's news operation is shown. Somewhere in all this is the reason the episode ends the first series on a success and settles Eddie's position at Radio West, though the resolution is lightweight: a religious group talked out of its beliefs by a private detective and a reporter in a single scene, with an auction raising five pounds standing in for any legal consequence for the man who took their money. It drew 15.2 million viewers.