Stand and Deliver

An experimental weapon has gone missing from a military research facility. It carries a new laser device, it is top secret, and it is unstable enough to blow up in the wrong hands, which is exactly where it has just landed. The thieves have no idea what they are carrying. Special Branch have to find them before the device does the finding for everyone. The men who took it are amateurs, which makes the thing more dangerous, not less. The gadget is the kind of thing the cold war produced in bulk: brilliant, dangerous, and one wrong knock away from a very bad afternoon.

Michael J. Bird wrote it, Tom Clegg directed. George Sewell is Craven, Patrick Mower is Haggerty, Paul Eddington is Strand and Frederick Jaeger is Fletcher. Ronald Radd is Leonard Gosling and Dennis Waterman is Frank Gosling, years before The Sweeney made him a household name. Ray Mort is Ron Murray, Stephanie Turner is Jean Gosling, Christopher Benjamin is Dr. Eric Blyth and Edwin Apps is Major Philip Erskine.

But the episode runs on a neat engine of dramatic irony. The audience knows the prize is a bomb, and the men carrying it do not, so every careless bump and dropped case is a small horror. The Goslings are a nice touch, ordinary men who have stolen something extraordinary and cannot possibly handle it. Stephanie Turner's Jean Gosling keeps the story human in the middle of all the hardware talk.

It is a race-against-the-clock story done properly, with a clear countdown and a good reason to keep watching. The gadget gives the team a problem that cannot be argued with, and the military men who built it do not make the asking any easier. The final stretch pays off the set-up without cheating, and the series' fondness for a ticking clock is well served here.