The Paradise Set

Bulman and Willis arrive in Manchester as officers nobody in the local underworld can place. That is the whole idea behind Unit 23: send in detectives whose faces mean nothing, and let the criminals keep talking to people they take for strangers. "The Paradise Set" opens the series by showing the method rather than explaining it, and then immediately tests it by giving the two men separate jobs.

DC Derek Willis is working a diamond robbery. DS George Bulman, with DC Linda Doran alongside him rather than in support, is working a run of violence against nightclub hostesses. Women at the Paradise Set and similar venues are being beaten up, and the assaults are too systematic to be random. The two enquiries converge on the same criminal connections: the hostesses are being leaned on because the club and its people touch the diamond disposal route, and the jewel raid is being pushed through the men doing the leaning. What looks like a violent-crime job is intimidation protecting stolen stones.

The resolution is not a whodunnit reveal. Two lines of enquiry built by different officers, neither sharing enough with the other, meet on one gang, and the CID group is forced into a single operation. The arrests close both the robberies and the assaults.

The episode is an origin story and it carries the weight of one. It has to establish a unit, a patch, a superior and two leads before the plot can move, and the exposition is heavy at times because of it. The clearest production fact about it is also the one that hurts it: Series 1 was shot mainly on videotape with only location work on film, so the studio material has the flat, brightly lit look of 1978 British tape drama and the action scenes sit badly against the film-recorded Manchester streets. A sequence in which Willis is menaced with mock machine-gun fire is the weakest passage in the episode, and the fight staging generally reads as a consequence of the format and the schedule rather than of anyone's intention.

What holds it together is Don Henderson. The gloves, the plastic bag and the poetry are props, and he plays the investigative intelligence underneath them, which is why the series was built on the character. Malcolm Tierney's Johnny Spencer gives the converging investigation a face, and Frances Tomelty's Doran is given real work, paired with Bulman on her own line rather than attached to Willis as an assistant. Later in the run the female lead's role narrows; this is the clearest instance of the original intention.

The pilot still disappoints anyone arriving for action fare, and the Paradise Set location is used at such length that there are long stretches with little happening. But it establishes the two-line structure the series repeats, and it is where Bulman, later given his own spin-off, begins as a lead in his own right.