First Night

Asher Biebermann, an Israeli minister, is snatched from outside the Festival Hall in full view of his police protection. Two men, Frank and John, bundle him into a car and take him to a house in a quiet residential street, where he ends up chained to a bed. It is a bare-faced kidnapping, the sort that leaves CI5 with almost nothing to work with: a shadowy photograph and a coded cassette tape, recovered from a telephone box after a tip-off.

The episode is mostly a puzzle about location. From a photograph and a tape, the team has to work out which house in which street holds the minister, and the pleasure of the thing is watching them do it. The detail work is the entertainment here, the patient reading of clues that most shows would have skipped on the way to the gunfight. Biebermann, meanwhile, spends most of the hour chained to that bed, which gives the kidnappers plenty of time to talk and the audience plenty of reason to worry about what happens when the police knock. Once the address is pinned down, the plan is to break in from the house next door, which is the kind of neighbourly raid only this series would think to stage.

Brian Clemens and Gerry O'Hara wrote it, and David Wickes directed. Arnold Diamond plays Biebermann, with Tony Vogel as Frank, David Howey as John, Julian Holloway as Harvey, John Nettleton as the minister, George Pravda as Hirschfield and Nadim Sawalha as an Arab diplomat. Sawalha would become a familiar face in British television for decades, but here he is one more piece in a quiet puzzle.

It is a restrained episode, heavier on deduction than destruction. The rescue, when it comes, feels earned, because the team had to find the door before they could kick it down.