Close Quarters

Bodie is on leave with a hand injury, which is about as safe as this show ever lets its men get. He is in the country with his girlfriend Julia when the day trip collides with the Meyer-Helmut terrorist group, and in the way of these things he ends up capturing their leader, Franz Myer. The rest of the gang do not take the loss quietly. They chase Bodie and Julia into a vicarage, kill the vicar, and settle in to wait.

The episode's trick is that the rescue team knows almost nothing. Bodie cannot get word out, and Cowley and Doyle are left travelling blind through the countryside, chasing clues that mostly lead nowhere. Every farmhouse they search is empty, every lead is cold, and the clock is doing the only moving. It is a hostage situation with the map torn in half. The quiet rural setting makes the violence feel worse than the usual London car park stuff, and the vicar's death lands because the show lets it sit for a moment instead of rushing on.

Brian Clemens wrote it and William Brayne directed. Gabrielle Drake is Julia, Allan Surtees is the doomed vicar, Clive Arrindell is Myer and Madlena Nedeva is Inge Helmut, with David Bradley as Tony Kristo and Joseph Charles as Jax. Bradley would later find fame as Argus Filch in the Harry Potter films, a world away from this damp English field, though the two roles share a certain glowering watchfulness.

It is an efficient little siege story that gets a lot of mileage out of an idea most shows would have spent ten minutes on. Stranded, outnumbered and out of contact, Bodie has to survive on his own until his colleagues work out where he is. The hand injury, that small detail from the opening, turns out to matter more than anyone expected.