The Gun

A gun changes hands and the trouble starts. Drug dealer Gary shoots an addict and throws the weapon away, and a fourteen-year-old schoolboy called Tony finds it. The boy hides it in the stage props at his school and, in the way of these things, accidentally wounds a friend with it. Suddenly a discarded murder weapon is the most dangerous object in London. The gun moves from hand to hand without anyone meaning it to, and each new owner makes the mess deeper.

Gary wants the gun back before it can be traced to him, and he wants Tony silenced. He snatches the boy from the school where Bodie's girlfriend Inger teaches, only to find his own heavies have ideas of their own and capture them both. CI5 are in the chase, and Gary is suddenly the man everyone is hunting, including the people who were supposed to be on his side. The evidence he needs to destroy is hidden in a school play's props, which is the sort of small, absurd detail this show always enjoyed.

Brian Clemens and Christopher Wicking wrote it, Dennis C. Lewiston directed. Robert Gwilym is Gary, and he gets the thankless job of making a desperate drug dealer almost sympathetic. Barry Angel is Tony, Celia Gregory is Inger, Peter Kelly is Franco, Zoot Money, the musician, is G.G. Lesley, David John is Jerry Lee and Nigel Pegram is Wendell.

The show often dealt in spies and geopolitics; this one is smaller, closer to the ground. A gun on a school stage is a long way from a nerve gas deal, and the change of scale suits the series, letting the tension come from ordinary places. The children at the centre of it give the episode a weight the usual plots cannot reach.

It is a solid, nasty little thriller about how quickly a careless moment can wreck several lives at once.