The Big Bang

Somewhere over the North of England, Spider Scott is sitting on a plane with what he's been told is a live bomb, heading for Russia. He didn't volunteer for the trip. The men who put him there expect him to play along with a scheme to smuggle a man out of the country, and they've picked their decoy well: the one passenger aboard who knows he can't argue. Half a million pounds is the real prize, and the bomb is nothing but a smokescreen, pulled to drag every pair of eyes in the airport away from the money. The big bang of the title is the one the audience waits for, and the one the criminals never intend to let happen.

The episode works because it keeps Spider at the wrong end of every decision. He's useful, he's expendable, and he knows both things at once, which gives the whole hour a grim little edge. Up in the air he can't climb out of trouble. Down on the ground, the robbery is moving ahead without him. Bulman and Willis are somewhere inside the machinery of it, chasing a case that keeps shifting shape under their hands.

Tim Aspinall and Kenneth Royce wrote it, Ken Grieve directed, and the regulars are all here: Stephen Yardley's Spider, Don Henderson's Bulman, Dennis Blanch's Willis, Vivienne McKee's Maggie and Fiona Curzon's Penny, with Johnny Shannon's Warren, William Squire's Laidlaw, Brian Croucher's Riesen, Arnold Diamond's Dodson and Oliver Maguire's Don Stevens filling the shadows.

The twist that the bomb is the decoy is the neatest thing in the script, a proper piece of misdirection that survives being explained out loud. And the show knows the difference between a bomb scare and a robbery; it plays both, and it plays the money as the louder alarm. Half a million pounds will do that.