Friends in High Places

A youth attacks a man in the public toilet of a hotel. The victim is one of the period's punk rockers and the man he tried to rob is Sir Harry Adams, a wealthy industrialist, who was set upon and then rescued by a helpful passer-by who happened to be on the spot. Bulman and Willis are put on the trail of the attacker, and Bulman makes no secret of his distaste for the safety-pin set. He is old and unfashionable and he does not like the look of the young man. He can also see that there is a case here that needs investigating more carefully than the surface suggests, and the episode is built on that instinct.

The passer-by is not who he appears to be. The attack was arranged, and its purpose was to frustrate a business deal Sir Harry was in the middle of making. The people who wanted the deal stopped are not criminals in the ordinary sense; they are men of standing, and they have used the machinery of respectable life to do the thing. The unit works the case, runs into a second set of interests watching the same attack for other reasons, and once Bulman and Willis understand what they have walked into they decide to spoil the fun rather than look away.

The episode's position is put in a short exchange between the fixer, Effingham, and a man he calls Charlie. Charlie asks what Effingham wants from him. Effingham answers that he wants his resignation, because none of us is above the law, people like us in particular. Charlie says he means he got found out. Effingham replies that that is just unforgiveable. The sin is not the crime, it is being caught. The guilty are not punished for what they did; they are removed for the embarrassment of having done it visibly. As the retrospective account puts it, it is a jolly old game in which the old boys went to school together, and it is only the lower ranks who get thrown on the scrapheap.

Freddie Jones plays Effingham as a man entirely comfortable with what he is doing, which is why the ending lands. He is not a hypocrite who believes his own excuses; he knows the rules are for other people and says so, and nobody contradicts him. The line is delivered by a man who means the opposite of what he says and the episode trusts the audience to hear it, which is sharp writing for 1979 ITV. Anthony Steel's Sir Harry is the second substantial guest part, and his position is the interesting one: he is the victim, he is of the same class as the men who arranged his attack, and he is caught by an arrangement his own kind set in motion.

This is the episode that introduces Det. Cons. Vanessa Bennett, Doran's replacement, whose arrival is written as an officer with her own professional manner rather than as the unit's woman. She remains with the series to its end, making her the longest-serving of its female leads. Neither Doran's exit nor Bennett's arrival is given a designed scene; the unit's third officer changes between stories rather than at them, which is the pattern of the first two series. The plot mechanics are conventional and the episode's quality comes entirely from who turns out to be responsible and what happens to them, which has not dated at all.