Fly by Night

Spender goes into a glass factory, and he goes in deep enough that his own boss cannot find him. The reason for the posting is a suspect in a security van robbery: a man named Phelan works on the shop floor, and Spender is there to watch him. The billing states the shape plainly, and the method is patience. He is placed, he blends, he waits, and the drama comes from the risk of exposure rather than from anything he does.

The setting is personal. Jimmy Nail had worked in a glass factory before acting and took his nickname from an accident there, and the episode puts its star back onto a factory floor in overalls. The production built the workplace as a populated environment rather than a single set for surveillance, with Roly, Les and Porky among the men he works beside. Watching it now, the shop floor is the best thing in the hour: a real Tyneside industry, staffed and noisy, with Spender's cover depending on being no more interesting than anyone else.

The second plot is where the episode gets its title and its humour. Keith Moreland's friend Blakey is caught up in a war between rival illegal fly posting outfits. Fly posting was a genuine Tyneside trade, and the episode treats the competition over walls as a war worth fighting rather than as vandalism, which is the same sympathetic posture the series takes towards Stick. Dave Hill, of Slade, plays Blakey, and the casting is a joke the production was clearly in on. The turf war erupts in public and runs alongside the factory job, and the two threads meet when Spender is caught up in the consequences of a cover he had expected to keep.

A third element, from the database listings rather than the billing, has Spender appalled when a young woman is attacked to punish her boyfriend, and setting out to catch those responsible. It gives the episode a victim beyond the surveillance job and sits with the factory and fly posting strands.

The weakness is that the two halves simply do not fit. The factory thread is a straight procedural carrying real danger and the fly posting war is broad comedy, and they run alongside one another without ever becoming one story. The comedy takes the title and a large share of the running time without bearing on the crime. The security van case is also left dangling in the record: no source names the person responsible or states how it resolves. What the episode does well is push the undercover element further than before and show the cost of it, which is that Spender ends up out of contact with the policing meant to support him. Christopher Fairbank, opposite him, is the reason the surveillance scenes hold.