Female Of The Species

An armed man phones in a claim: six bombs, planted in a department store, and he will say where they are for ten thousand pounds. The threat is immediate, and the episode runs on the clock. But the man on the phone, Maurice Hobbes, turns out to be a washed-up villain, and the real danger, the title warns you, is female.

Milton Johns plays Hobbes with a lovely defeated air, a man who has talked his way into a job far above his station. Behind him stands the dangerous woman the title promises, and the task force, Watt and Hawkins at the head, has to work out who is actually running the show while the bombs tick in the background. Sarah Craze's Samantha and Shirley Cheriton's Honor add to the pressure on site, and Patricia Hayes, as Anne Hobbes, brings the comic menace she did so well; Hayes, best known as a comedy performer, is exactly the right casting for a villain you keep wanting to laugh at. Denis DeMarne's Les Barry and Tony Kenyon's Thomson complete the company.

Elwyn Jones and Allan Prior wrote it, Lennie Mayne directed. The department store setting gives the production a properly public sense of panic, and the episode is good on the small logistics of a bomb scare: the cleared floors and the long waiting, the way a threat turns a crowd into a problem of its own.

The twist is the point. Hobbes is the kind of criminal the squad has handled a hundred times, but the woman behind him is the species the title means, and the episode gets a lot of mileage out of watching the men in the room keep underestimating her. Ten thousand pounds is small change next to the fear it buys, and the episode knows it. It is tense, neat and a little bit nasty, in the best way.