Charlie's Brother's Birthday

Someone steals coffins, and does so with considerable effort. A gang of masked men goes to great lengths to take what should be a valueless object, and no one informs the police. That lack of a complaint is the clue drawing the Inter City Squad in: a theft nobody reports is a theft with something in it worth more than the container. Bulman and Willis go under cover in a jazz band, and their cover gives them access to the club where the coffin thieves and the people behind the smuggling operate.

The jazz club is both cover and subject. Sonny Boy Saltz returns from the series opener, played again by Lol Coxhill, and the episode's incidental jazz is Coxhill's own composition, so the series' soundtrack is part of the fiction rather than laid over it. The case is an international smuggling ring using coffins to move goods, with Colm Meaney as Peter Smolett among those working it, and Bella and the customs and shop staff in the guest list marking out the working end of the trade.

Running alongside is the thread that gives the episode its title: a relationship involving DS Charlie Baker, promoted from detective constable in the last series, and Inspector Jenny Faber, a woman police officer played by Shirley Stelfox. The script called for a romantic interlude between Bulman and a woman police officer, and the production history here is unusually well documented because the director wrote about it. Roger Tucker, casting the part, picked Stelfox's photograph out of the Spotlight directory without knowing she was Don Henderson's wife in real life, and the episode became the first occasion on which the two appeared on screen together. Henderson is therefore put in the unaccustomed position of romantic lead, which for a character actor best known for eccentricity was a stretch, and casting Stelfox opposite him gives the pairing the ease of a real marriage.

The climax is the episode's strongest claim to attention. As scripted the pursuit was, in the director's own words, a dull affair down back alleys; the production instead staged a sequence inspired by the ending of The Third Man, filmed in an underground river beneath Stockport, in a concrete-lined cavern reached through a door in the side of a public lavatory. The location had been unknown to most local people. Pre-lighting it took a day, which was not normally possible on a television series, and filming was difficult enough that an actor was injured and then his stunt double, so parts had to be shot using the hands of one and the feet of the other. The shaft where the characters emerge from the ground was found by chance at another location and was a working sewage works. The sequence was later described as the nearest a television series came to doing James Bond.

The soundtrack was assembled the same deliberate way. Series of this kind had no budget to compose music to picture and normally used library discs, so Tucker built a track from commercial records, layering two Tangerine Dream tracks and two by the jazz band Pigbag, mixed with water and industrial effects, in what he describes as deejaying before the term existed. That is an unusual approach for British television in 1982.

The script is uneven, and the director himself called it weird, with the coffin-smuggling puzzle and the romantic interlude sitting at different temperatures. What the episode has instead is the amount of work put into the production: a pre-lit underground location, layered music from commercial records, and night shooting with stunts. It is the most technically ambitious of the season's seven.