The French Collection

Gillespie gives Spender the job: go to Marseille, collect a naughty boy and bring him back. The naughty boy is Tommy Thornton, played by Tom Bell, the antagonist introduced in the third series and a long-standing target. Thornton is a smuggler, and Spender's history with him is personal, because the attempts to bring him in before had left Spender close to Thornton's wife. The special returns to the season's unfinished business on both fronts at once.

The escort goes wrong almost immediately. A car crash puts Spender in hospital and his prisoner is reported dead. The official version is that the man he was escorting was killed in the crash. Spender comes round, does not believe it, and starts working out that the death has been arranged. The Radio Times preview gave the twist away in advance: the prisoner, apparently dead, is burned alive, except that there is no body.

What follows is a chase across Marseille. Spender finds he cannot trust the local police, an experience that strips away his institutional support and leaves him with only Stick, who turns up in France as usual and takes part in the special's most physical sequence, riding the roof of a cable car with two heavies. Sammy Johnson did much of that stunt himself rather than handing it to a double, and the retrospective record notes that the credibility comes from it. Janet Thornton returns to the story as the woman Spender had been involved with and the wife of the man he has come to collect, and her real role in the case emerges late.

The endgame is a final bust on an international smuggling operation with ties into police corruption. The trade is jewels, and Janet is revealed as a jewel smuggler, a revelation one retrospective treats as arriving out of the blue even as it sets the conclusion in motion. The last act turns on Thornton's wife attempting to bring his ashes through customs, a scene that several accounts find drained of suspense because the audience already knows Thornton is alive and back in custody.

The criticism here is unusually well documented for this series, and the special is the most discussed instalment of the run. One retrospective calls it dated, generic and anticlimactic, finds the premise unworthy of a feature length, and judges the French locations underused; another calls it a return to form packed with action and a fairly decent storyline. Both assessments are on the record. Bell is given relatively little to work with while Thornton is presumed dead, which limits the part. Against that, the production values are the highest the show ever had, the styling is deliberate, with Spender in a black suit and Stick unusually well turned out, and the direction uses flashback and nightmare sequences that look like nothing else in the run. Berwick Kaler's Dan Boyd is absent, the only production of the twenty-one he misses, and Keith Moreland does not return, though Tony McAnaney's music does. It was the last Spender production. No fourth series followed despite the ratings, and Nail moved on to Crocodile Shoes.