Bad Company

Two things happen at once here and they meet. The first is an internal investigation into Spender himself. CID is looking at his conduct, specifically his continuing affair with Janet Thornton, the wife of a local villain. The Regional Crime Squad is brought into the picture, and Gillespie warns him about fraternising with suspects. What had been a private risk becomes an operational problem, and the episode is the point at which the series turns Spender's relationship with a criminal's wife into a formal professional jeopardy rather than a personal one.

The second is the kidnapping of Gillespie. Spender's superior is taken, and the episode turns on how a force responds to the abduction of one of its own senior officers. Peter Guinness's performance under confinement is the strongest thing in the hour, and it was singled out later as such. There is a neat structural logic to the pairing: Spender is under scrutiny for his entanglement with the Thornton household, and the man scrutinising and warning him is himself in the hands of criminals.

The episode's theme is the cost of divided loyalties, and its interest is less in investigation than in consequence. The affair is already known; what the hour examines is what the institution does with it. That makes it a different kind of story from the rest of the season, since the pressure comes from Spender's own side rather than from outside. The series had used internal scrutiny of his methods before, and this is the sharpest version of it.

Where it falls short is in the familiarity of the construction. A detective compromised by a villain's wife is a well-worn shape, and the located summaries show the internal investigation producing nothing beyond a warning and pressure: no charge, no finding, no disciplinary result is recorded. The kidnapping's resolution is equally undocumented, with no source stating how Gillespie is freed or where he is held. Nor is there anything in the evidence to support reading the episode as a broader statement about corruption in the force as a system. It is about one officer, one affair and one force deciding what to do about both.

Stan Hey had written for the series before and worked on Auf Wiedersehen, Pet, and he handles the collision cleanly. The other regulars stay in the background, with Frances, Eric, the daughters, Eileen and Keith all present while Spender is under scrutiny. What the episode leaves behind is durable: the affair becomes a running institutional problem that the series carries into its final regular episode and its special.