Utmost Good Faith

Tim Reynolds is heavily in debt. He climbs a construction rig in the centre of the city and jumps to his death, and the opening is played without dialogue. His widow tells Eddie that she and her husband had been developing a new computer to be fitted to cars, and that she is being pursued by two debt collectors who make a series of threatening visits. The debt dates from Tim's student days, started small, and was only treated as a debt at all because of a legal complication. He had found himself out of his depth and the balance had grown.

Eddie visits the company holding the computer records the debt is held on, and finds a man who worked with him at his old computer firm employed there and involved with the debt-collecting operation. Erica's check of police records shows the man served four years in prison and has only found work by using false references. Eddie pressures him into clearing the widow's record. He runs and is seized by the two collectors, who take him to a dock and question him; Eddie arrives, fights briefly, drives them off and gets him out. What Eddie uncovers is a scheme run by local businessmen. Businesses are entered on a bad-debtors list held on the computer system; once a business is on the list it cannot obtain credit, and the point of that is to make it fail, at which point the men behind the list move in with a derisory offer. Tim Reynolds's student debt was the lever used on him, and the car computer he and his wife were developing was the thing worth taking.

The crime here is not a killing. The death is a suicide caused by pressure, and the wrong is committed by men who never touch anybody: they put a name on a list. That is the structure the script uses, three encounters with the collectors, two visits to the records company, and a final confrontation that turns out to be a beating in a dock rather than an arrest. The opening is the most technically ambitious single sequence the series made, a slow-motion fall from the rig filmed head-first towards the camera. The other image the fan literature singles out is Eddie being threatened with a broken bottle, shot with the lens inside the makeshift weapon and the actor looking directly into it through a ring of broken glass, and it depends on Trevor Eve holding still.

The episode is the fullest statement in the run of what Eddie's history means to him. He came into the series as a computer expert who had a breakdown after wrecking equipment, and here he is inside a credit records office again, refusing credit at the end because his own file is not clean. Erica's laugh at that is the last line of the story and it is earned. Carol Gillies and Andrew McCulloch play the collectors as ordinary employees doing unremarkable work, which is what makes them frightening: polite, methodical and entirely without doubt about what they do.

Where it fails is coherence. The collecting pair are established as physically frightening and then dispatched in one brief fight; the businessmen behind the list are named in dialogue and never properly confronted, and the episode ends at a hi-fi counter instead of in a room with them. The fan literature's own verdict, that it has many standout moments which do not cohere into a satisfying whole, is fair. What has not dated at all is the subject. Credit reference files, automated decisions about who may borrow and debt collection by pressurised visits are all still recognisable, and the episode is unusual for 1980 television in treating a computer system as the instrument of the crime rather than as a piece of science fiction. It drew 12.0 million viewers.