Blind Run

Protecting a visiting dignitary is supposed to be the dull end of CI5's work, all timetables and locked doors. The operation to guard Hanish, a Middle Eastern diplomat on a secret visit to Britain, starts out looking like exactly that. It stops looking like it almost immediately. No sooner have Bodie and Doyle collected their man than the gunmen appear, and they seem to know every turn of the itinerary before the team has made it. A secret visit is only a secret until somebody starts shooting, and the somebody here has clearly read the schedule.

The episode runs on a single nasty idea: somebody on the inside knows the plan. Every supposedly safe location on the list turns out to be anything but, and two safe houses in a row fail to live up to their name. The minister himself stays calm through all of it, which only makes the panic around him feel more justified. The pursuit ends on a houseboat, which is at least a change of scenery from the usual warehouses and car parks, and the showdown has the series' characteristic abruptness. The houseboat finale is cramped and loud, the last place anyone would choose for a last stand. Whoever is feeding the gunmen their information stays one step ahead, which is what makes the hour so uneasy.

Brian Clemens and Ranald Graham wrote it, and Tom Clegg directed. Jasmina Hilton is Leila, Tommy Boyle is Charlie, Sandra Payne is Phillipa, Tony Jay and Steve Plytas are foreign observers, Kevin Brennan is a minister and Ahmed El Shenawi is a bodyguard.

It is a lean, paranoid hour, the kind of episode that works on the audience's sense that the walls have ears. It is the rare episode where the enemy never needs to be seen to be believed. Routine bodyguard work, this is not.