The Ojuka Situation

Colonel Ojuka is a former head of an African state, and he's in London to attend a conference with a view to getting his job back. Cowley doesn't want the assignment. The British government has arranged it, which means CI5 has to provide the bodyguards, and Cowley's annoyance is the least of anyone's problems once the shooting starts. Ojuka may be out of power, but the conference is his chance to change that, and the people who want him stopped are not going to wait for a vote.

Bodie and Doyle foil two assassination attempts on Ojuka in fairly short order. The odd part is Ojuka himself. He genuinely seems to have no idea who's trying to kill him, and he's not much interested in finding out. Cowley's first suspect is a government official with business interests in Africa, and that thread holds up well enough. But the show is careful to point the other way too. Somebody close to Ojuka has a grievance, and those are the people who know where the bodyguards stand. Neither lead gets waved away early, and the show gets real mileage out of watching the two agents weigh them.

Brian Clemens and Dave Humphries wrote it, Christopher King directed. Clarke Peters makes Ojuka a dignified, slightly baffled figure, a long way from the detective he'd become on the waterfront of Baltimore. Shope Shodeinde's Katunda Ojuka, Geoffrey Palmer's Avery, Steve Alder's Murphy, John Horsley's Headmaster, Charles Dance's Parker and Al Matthews's Faroud make up the rest of the chessboard.

The episode's quiet joke is that the man at the centre of a political storm has no appetite for politics at all. He wants the job back because it's his. Everyone else, from the civil servant with the business interests to the person standing closest to him, is playing a different game, and the show lets you watch all of them at once.