Posted: Monday 25th August 2008

Reviewed by Gregory Hughes

The ambiguous title leaves room to wonder just who the victim of this thriller really is. When Vincent Craig (John Shrapnel) discovers that his daughter Sue has been kidnapped and there is a ransom demand, he decides to investigate himself rather than pay the money, which leaves his daughter at the mercy of her kidnappers. Originally shown in January 1980, this six-part serial kick-started the third and final series of Thames TV'sArmchair Thriller.

There are relatively few twists and turns along the way for this straightforward story. Vincent's wife Ellen (Meg Ritchie) is happy for her husband to take the matter into his own hands, and quite early on we see the two kidnappers in a warehouse with the young girl. The stakes, the same throughout the serial, is whether or not Vincent will track down the kidnappers in time and resuce his daughter. This leaves finding out who is behind the kidnapping as the main source of intrigue; which introduces the wonderful character actor Edward Burnham as a phoenetics expert who listens to the voice on the ransom demand tape and determines which northern town the kidnapper is from. It's a bit of a stretch, even in 1980, to assume the kidnapper is still in that town, as people move around much more than ever before, but nevertheless the action shifts north. A minor irritation is that all of the shady or obviously malevolent characters in the story share one thing in common - regional accents!

There are some lovely moments in this serial, but it is hard to get too excited about it because on the whole it misfires, and has to be considered the weakest instalment of this usually first-rate series. John Shrapnel is an excellent character actor, but he struggles in sympathetic parts and it is hard to want him to succeed here, especially given his morally dubious decision to not meet the kidnappers' demands. There's also, surprisingly for this series, some lightweight acting. Paul Jerrico makes a very dull Steve, friend and colleague to Vincent who seems to just get in the way. With a very linear plot, there's not enough intrigue to hold the attention over six episodes, and there's plenty of padding along the way, with unnecessary or repeated scenes that don't advance the story. The main problem is that Michael Ashe's script doesn't offer enough originality or intrigue; and it's a shame the series' script editor (Robert Holmes, himself a brilliant writer), wasn't able to rescue this script or cull it down to four episodes, where the weaknesses would have been better disguised. On the plus side, there's some atmospheric filmed location shooting in the north, and an exciting climactic chase scene in the final episode that shows some fine work from director Gareth Davies, but there's every chance the casual viewer won't have made it this far.

I would normally wholeheartedly endorse this usually wonderul series, but this particular story is not up to the usual high standard you can expect from Armchair Thriller.