Decision by Committee

"Decision by Committee" is the episode where the plane is the least of anyone's problems. Willie Caine and CIA covert-action agent Karen Milner are on a Malaysian Airlines flight back from Sri Lanka when terrorists take it during a stopover in Turkey. Two of the most capable people the West has are sitting in a hijacked cabin, and the whole hour is about what happens when the people who could help them are not allowed to. The men holding the plane have their own reasons, and the episode is in no hurry to explain them.

But Burnside wants the SAS sent in. That is the whole of his plan, and it is a good one. His superiors will not agree, or cannot decide, and the episode gives every minute of hesitation its proper weight. The title does the job. Decisions by committee are careful, slow, and almost always late, and the show is openly contemptuous of that.

The structure is the best thing about it. The camera cuts between the cabin, where the danger is real and immediate, and the committee rooms of Whitehall, where careers are on the line and the talking never stops. Caine and Milner have to deal with the guns; Burnside has to deal with the building, and it is clearly the harder job.

Ian MacKintosh wrote it, Michael Ferguson directed. Roy Marsden anchors it as Burnside, with Ray Lonnen's Willie Caine, Jana Shelden's Karen Milner, Richard Vernon's 'C' and Alan MacNaughtan's Sir Geoffrey Wellingham around him. Bob Sherman plays Jeff Ross, Michael Cashman Mike Wallace, Jerome Willis Matthew Peele, Elizabeth Bennett Diane Lawler and Brian Osborne Sam.

It is a hostage drama that keeps its hostages in the back seat, and it is all the tenser for it. Burnside spends the hour fighting the building. The terrorists never once make him as angry as his own side does, and anyone who has ever tried to get a decision out of a committee will recognise the hour.