Stake Out

A CI5 agent called Fraser is shadowing what looks like a drugs gang operating out of a bowling alley when he stumbles on something much bigger, and gets himself killed before he can tell Cowley what it is. Bodie and Doyle take over the stake out and find a man dying of plutonium poisoning, whose last word is a name: Swallows. It turns out the Swallows Bowling Club is the front for a band of white supremacists with a bomb planted somewhere in the alley, big enough to take out a large slice of London.

The episode's pleasure is in the gap between the setting and the stakes. Ten-pin bowling is about the least threatening backdrop this series ever used, and the show plays it completely straight, letting the ordinary hum of the alley sit alongside the knowledge that there is a device under the floor somewhere. The alleys stay open, the pins keep falling, and the bomb squad works in a building full of people having a nice evening out. The plutonium is properly grim, the kind of detail that tells you these are not small-timers, and the dying man's single word hangs over the whole investigation.

Brian Clemens and Dennis Spooner wrote it, and Benjamin Wickers directed. David Collings is Frank Turner, Barry Jackson is Bob, Ronald Leigh-Hunt is Doctor Binney, and Pamela Stephenson appears as an attractive blonde, her Not the Nine O'Clock News fame still a couple of years off. Tony Osoba, billed here with a description instead of a name, would soon be a familiar face from Porridge.

It is a race against the clock in an unlikely venue, and the show keeps the tension honest right up to the deactivation. The bowling alley was never the joke it looked like being. That is the whole trick.