Paying Guests

A petty crook finds a quantity of stolen money. The cash is the proceeds of a bank robbery and the man who finds it is not the man who took it, which puts him in the position the title describes: he is holding the proceeds of a serious crime without being part of the gang that committed it, and the men who want it back know he has it.

Bulman co-opts Briscoe, returning from episode five, into lodging with the Parkers, the family assisting the enquiry. The two men move in with the household they are protecting rather than watching the house from outside, which makes the danger proximate and gives the episode a warmth the rest of Series 1 lacks. The arrangement is the joke and the tension at once. A family with a windfall they never asked for is sheltering two policemen while the men who want the money work out where it has gone, and the episode's own question, raised by the mediagems guide, is whether the enemy really lurks only on the outside. The Parkers are the title's paying guests in the arrangement as much as Bulman is.

The subject is the cost of a windfall. A petty crook who finds stolen money has acquired a liability rather than a prize, and the episode treats the money as an unmanageable problem throughout. Duty runs through it: the unit's obligation is to people who are not entirely innocent of what has happened to them, and the protection they are given is not conditional on their being blameless.

It is the most comic of the first series after the opener, and its humour comes from the domestic arrangement rather than from set pieces, which is why it works. Amanda Barrie plays Mrs Parker and Michael Byrne returns as Briscoe, and the pairing of Bulman with Briscoe rather than with Willis is the episode's structural departure. It is the only time in Series 1 that a guest character comes back, and the return confirms the outcome of the earlier episode, in which Briscoe was under suspicion. That single piece of continuity is what the run otherwise lacks.

The limitation is that it is a small story to end a first series on. The case would not have looked out of place mid-season, and the finale is a good episode rather than a culminating one. Singer, Doran and Rainbow are all absent. The resolution, including what becomes of the money and of the two Williams brothers, is not stated in any listing consulted. What it does mark is the end of the Manchester videotape period: the unit returns in 1979 with more film and a changed cast, Doran replaced and Rainbow to follow, which makes this the last episode with the original Unit 23 line-up as it stood at the start.