Heroes

An American senator, John Jerry Patterson, is shot dead in broad daylight at a set of bogus roadworks, in full view of the motorists crawling past. The killers vanish into the traffic without a trace. It is the kind of public, brazen murder that embarrasses a government and leaves a police force guessing, and it is where the episode's title starts to bite.

Cowley's plan to flush out the gang is to plant a newspaper story claiming the killers' faces have been recognised. It is a decent trick with a rotten flaw: the witnesses' identities get disclosed along with the story, and two of them are murdered for their trouble. The newspaper angle gives the episode a sour, contemporary flavour, the press as a weapon that cuts both ways. From there the job becomes protection work as much as detection. Bodie and Doyle are joined by Tommy, a CI5 operative billed as a loose cannon, and he lives up to the description, while one of the surviving witnesses offers himself up as bait to draw the killers out.

Brian Clemens and Peter Hammond wrote it, and William Brayne directed. John Castle is good value as Tommy, with Rufus Collins as Tin Can, Thomas Baptiste as Huntley, Dorothy White as Mrs. Lewis, Robert McBain as Mr. Lewis, Damien Thomas as a raider and Ralph Michael as the estate car driver. Gordon Jackson's Cowley has the thankless job of sending people into the line of fire on the strength of a story he wrote himself.

It is an uncomfortable episode about the cost of publicity, and it holds up better than most of the series' gunfights. The dead witnesses are the point, and the show does not let anyone forget them. Heroes, in this story, are mostly the people nobody asked whether they wanted to be brave.