Mocking Bird

Malicious messages start being left for Eddie at Radio West. The sender has a Belfast accent, brags that he is going to carry out a series of assaults under Eddie's nose and taunts him about his competence as a private ear. There is no client and no case. The calls are not requests for help, and the show's central premise, that a phone-in is how the unheard get a hearing, is turned inside out in the first five minutes and left that way.

A woman returning from work is attacked. The caller rings again. Then Sonia is attacked and taken to hospital, and Eddie begins to show the strain. The police are involved, in the person of an inspector who is more hindrance than help and treats Eddie as a nuisance. A security guard at Radio West who also works as a disc jockey at the hospital tells Eddie he recognises the voice as that of an old patient who used to make requests on his hospital show, and finds the tape of the old programme. The caller is identified from it as Ron Bazely. Eddie tracks him down and chases him, and is knocked unconscious by Bazely's mother, who believes Shoestring has come to demand child support.

Back at the flat, Eddie finds a message in his own voice, a message he never recorded, asking Erica to meet him at the boat. Erica goes, and is attacked there but not hurt. Eddie works out that the tape must have been assembled from fragments of his own broadcasts. He is suspended from Radio West. The security guard then telephones him and asks him to come to the station, saying Bazely has just been seen there. Eddie arrives and is locked in a darkened studio with the man, who taunts him in a Belfast accent. He has been behind the whole campaign, jealous of Eddie's success and of the attention a Radio West investigator gets. Eddie throws a chair through a plate glass window and pushes him into a chair, on the edge of losing control and of doing to him what he has been doing to women. He asks him why he had to attack women to make his point. The man sits in silence. Eddie keeps hold of himself and picks up the telephone to call the police.

The pacing is the achievement. The attacks escalate in three stages and the interval between them shortens, so the episode generates dread without a body count and without a police investigation to relieve it. It is also the bleakest and most sustained hour of the second series, and the attacks get closer to Eddie each time: a stranger, then Sonia, then a message in his own voice aimed at the woman he lives with. The jealousy motive is a small motive for large cruelty, which is the episode's argument, that the ordinary man who has been overlooked is more dangerous than the professional criminal because there is no reasoning with a grievance that has no content. David Sibley plays him as a nobody for the whole hour, never rude, never suspicious, always the one who approaches Eddie rather than the other way round, and the script's use of that is set up before the reveal rather than after it.

The weaknesses are the accents and the dead end. The Belfast voice is the entire mechanism of the mystery and it is not convincing, so the episode asks the audience to accept a false sound as a false identity. The Bazely strand, the man whose voice was stolen and whose mother knocks Eddie out, is abandoned once it has served its purpose. The fan site rates this as the best episode the series made, with the caveat about the accents, and describes Eddie as perilously close to another breakdown, which given that the character's history includes a psychiatric admission is exactly the point of the climax. The BBC brought it back in 1993 for a themed night on television policemen, on the grounds that the police feature in it more heavily than in any other episode. It drew 12.3 million viewers.