This episode really goes into overdrive regarding Eddie’s past with computers, but uses it to good and practical effect. Some excellent direction from Marek Kanievska combined with a formidable pairing of Andrew McCulloch as bullyboy Parker with Carol Gillies’ icy cool Joyce Walsh ensures that their scenes are some of the most powerful in the episode. It is marred only for the eagle-eyed by the use of a substitute Cortina in a close-up for Eddie; the number plate is clearly wrong being three years newer and almost impossible for the model. This tiny scene of Eddie stuck in traffic would seem to have been shot when the episode fell behind in its shooting schedule and was probably directed by either production unit manager Colin Dudley or director’s assistant Joan Marine at the last minute. For any anoraks reading this, Eddie’s number is VUC959M, the imposter was PLC628R!

Another fad of the early Eighties is investigated in Looking for Mr. Wright by Robert Bennett. A lady, Lois, goes to a video dating agency and picks out Clive. They have dinner and seem to get on well. However, after glancing at another table, he makes his excuses and goes to the gents. Some of the party corner him, intending to rough him up, but he breaks the cubicle window and escapes. Left to pay for the meal and unhappy at his abrupt departure, Lois is left with only his rose. Erica is also unhappy next day when notes Lois has had typed up for her are full of errors resulting in her case being thrown out. She shouts at Lois who breaks down in tears so Erica takes her to Eddie. He goes to the Stepping Out Agency, but they will not divulge any information; it’s confidential. Meanwhile, Clive is packing, aiming to leave quickly. Eddie goes to the restaurant and talks first to the waiter who checked the toilet for Clive, then to the manager, Monsieur Armar, who fails to admit he’s had the window fixed; Eddie finds fresh putty. Armar alerts ‘Ma’s party to Eddie’s questioning. Eddie follows up on the restaurant reservations, contacting a Miss Adams who could help. In the meantime, he cons Erica into going to the Agency on the pretext of looking for her ‘Mr Right’ to look for Clive’s tape. Clive checks out of his rented apartment, with a bribe to the doorman to deny he was ever there. Eddie talks to swimmer Miss Adams, who tells him she didn’t actually see Clive go, but he couldn’t have gone to the toilet as her boyfriend had found it locked. Two men from the party came from there to complain, the party being five men and one woman, ‘mutton dressed up as lamb’ she calls her. Eddie questions the waiter again and finds out that the party was Maggie Devlin’s family, of which she is the head and says Armar’s tied up with them. Eddie goes to the fair where Maggie’s family live and work. Eventually he gets to see her, but while she answers his questions, she gives little away except she mistakenly says Clive was chased off when Eddie said nothing of the sort. That night, she sends sons Denny and Elvis to pinch Clive’s file from the agency, dragging owner Mrs Summers in next morning to complain to Don that Eddie broke in to get the details! Don instructs him to get the stuff back. Eddie goes back to Lois to see if there’s anything she has remembered about Clive that might help; she still has the boxed rose, their only clue. Eddie goes to the florists, who does remember him buying a few of the same rose and gives him the address. In the meantime, Denny and Elvis are ransacking Clive’s apartment trying to find out where he’s gone. When Eddie turns up, the doorman puts him off, but Eddie later returns to the apartment and is coshed by Denny. Maggie is mad; they’ve failed but must find Clive so he can pay for what he did to her daughter Christine. Having his injuries tended by Erica, Eddie remembers the other roses and realises that Clive must have had other dates, still on file at the Agency. Waiting until Miss Summers has gone out, Eddie poses as a computer repair man in order to get at their terminal and gets information on the other women he had dates with. He goes to see one of them, a ballroom dancer who remembers him and has his name and address too! After ‘persuading’ Clive’s doorman to part with the information, Maggie, Denny and Elvis trace him to his hotel. And Eddie turns up after Maggie’s party have taken Clive ‘out to dinner’. Maggie rails at Clive at her trailer, but in the end rather than have Denny work him over, she lets him go. However, this isn’t the end of it; she intends her other lads to kill him for what happened, although it’s apparent Christine took her own life when Clive was out of the country. Eddie turns up and is kept talking with Maggie while out on the funfair Clive is trying to stay away from the other Devlin clan members. Eddie escapes and catches up, just in time to be roughed up along with Clive. Denny intervenes; it’s not Clive’s fault Christine killed herself, it’s Maggie’s. He says all Maggie wanted was to make Christine a mirror image of herself, a twisted woman who despises men. Instead she fell for the first man who was kind to her – Clive. He stalks off, taking the lads with him. Clive is grateful to Eddie for coming to his assistance, although even when Eddie tells him it was all at Lois’ instigation, he doesn’t understand, something that doesn’t sit well with Eddie. Next day at Radio West, Lois is waiting; Eddie tries to ease the blow by making apologies for Clive, but she doesn’t believe him. She asks his name, which Eddie divulges as Wright and leaves it at that. There is no happy ending for either side in this case, as Eddie expresses with a shrug to Sonia.

Once again, Eddie’s past is used to good effect with him being able to employ his computer skills to get the information. The star turn for the episode was provided by the late Diana Dors as Maggie Devlin, who gave her character the power and authority in a way that only she could as head of the family. The episode was also the first to be script edited by Chris Boucher, a writer taken on board for Doctor Who a few years previously by outgoing Shoestring script editor Robert Holmes when he was editing that show. It would be left to Boucher to hone the remaining stories, and indeed to provide the final episode which, at this point, had not been commissioned or written.

Another Man’s Castle by Dave Humphries starts simply enough, just another couple moving from one house to another. The removal van sets off for their new house with them a way behind. The movers stop for a drink and the van is stolen. The furniture is moved into an unfurnished holiday cottage, just in time for businessman Terry Bowen to bring in a couple of tenants. Unbeknown to him they are short on cash – and the girl Cleo intends to pawn the furniture to raise spending money. Eddie has been evicted onto his boat by Erica; her ex-husband has returned to see her and as he still owns half the house he could take her to court for sub-letting without permission. Eddie is barred, at least for the moment. He goes into work and gets the message from the couple, the Hoskin’s. Their tv has turned up at an outdoor market on Trader’s stall, and the police haul him down the station. Trader knows Bowen, although Bowen is unaware the item causing the trouble is one of the items he’s had ‘installed’. Ex-boxer Bowen phones a couple of men, who seem to be on the run, to check all’s well. As luck would have it, Erica also knows Bowen from some lectures she gave in business law; Eddie doesn’t think much of him. He goes to see the Hoskin’s, and although he gets the brush-off from Mrs Hoskin because she’s upset, he says he’ll continue with the case. He goes to see the removal men and while he’s talking to foreman Howard, mate Billy calls Bowen’s club manager, Nat Povey. As Eddie leaves he hears him end the call and pointedly remarks about it. After buying a cottage, Bowen goes to evict the tenant, old Mr King, who doesn’t like what he’s told. He keeps watch on Bowen when he leaves and walks away to another cottage where the two men lying low make it plain they wanted privacy and quiet. Bowen goes to his club for a workout and Povey tells him Eddie’s been sniffing around. Bowen wants to know all about him and Erica’s connection with Eddie comes out. Eddie goes to see Trader and does a sketch of Cleo from his description. Bowen takes Erica to lunch, and asks her to get Eddie to help out at one of his ‘good cause’ events which Eddie does. While there Eddie spots Cleo, but is unable to follow until later after leaving Bowen’s small after-bash party he goes to see Trader and drives him around looking for her without luck. Going back to collect Erica, he’s filled in by her on Bowen’s business interests. He asks her to get a list of his holiday properties; Erica even suggests the right connection. Cleo and boyfriend Sean return to the cottage to find the unhappy Bowen waiting for them. He takes their money and kicks them out, unaware she has an antique chess set in her bag ready to pawn again! Erica meets Eddie and gives him the list of three properties. He goes to one, and on the beach meets old Mr King, who is too frightened to answer questions properly, although he does say the cottage Eddie asks about holds two men, no girl. Eddie passes them on the way back, and something niggles. He goes to another property, which is unfurnished. Here he comes face to face with Povey and his mate, who clobber him. They’ve just been loading up the furniture to take to the evicted Mr King’s cottage. Sean takes the chess set to Trader; he sees Cleo hovering and stalls Sean into coming back later. Don is mad with Eddie, as Bowen’s filing breaking and entering charges. Eddie gets Trader’s call and finally catches up with Cleo. He gets her to tell Bowen that she’s going to identify some furniture Eddie’s found; perhaps Bowen would like to see her gone, for a price? Bowen goes up to King’s cottage to check, and Eddie rolls up. He only had suspicions; Bowen’s presence confirms them. Bowen decides to rough him up, but while they are talking Mr King sneaks into the cottage and sets it alight, locking himself in. They break the door down and get him out, and the police roll up. Eddie thinks they’ve come because of the fire, but actually they’ve come for the two men next door that Bowen has been sheltering; they did a bank robbery in Bude earlier that week. Bowen is arrested as well.

Eddie’s next case ranks amongst his strangest. In Where Was I by Peter Miller, a man is camping up on the moors. When he hears an engine on the other side of the hill, he goes to look. There is some sort of building site there. A helicopter flies over and down and two men get into it. For some reason they get out with a third person, a woman, who spots him up on the hill. Getting back in, their helicopter takes off and chases the camper, who trips and bangs his head on a rock. He gets up and is chased towards a road, where he stops a passing milk truck and gets a lift into town; the helicopter flies off. The man has lost his memory because of the knock, but an envelope in his pocket gets him home; his wife initially thinks his memory loss is a story. The two men go to a camping shop with the man’s tent and see Ellery, the owner. At the station, Eddie’s expenses are raising Don’s blood pressure, so it’s just as well this new case comes in, courtesy of Dr. Fischer who says it’s not a sham; Keith Amery is perfectly fit in all other regards. He had had a tiff with his wife about his overworking, drove off to work and never arrived; obviously he went camping instead and came back like this. She’s brought the clothes he came home in and his car keys; it is still missing. Eddie puts out a plea for the car to be found and the car park attendant phones in while Eddie goes to see Amery, who can remember nothing except being picked up by the milk truck and coming home. Meanwhile, in prison, an Australian prisoner Tom Laidlaw receives a visit from the woman in the helicopter, Denise; they are definitely planning a break from a prison work party renewing the bridge near where Amery was picked up and it seems what he saw was a rehearsal. Eddie goes to the car park and in Amery’s boot he finds the man’s jacket with a receipt from Ellery. He visits him and confirms all he’s asked. Later along the coast, a beach party is going full tilt. A biker comes over the dune and stops at their shack; it is Ellery! He advises the Australian, Daryl, that Eddie has been asking after the camper. Amery tries his car for size to see if it jogs anything; it doesn’t. However, he remembers the lift and Eddie does a sketch of the milk wagon from this. The Australians meet up and concoct a plan to get to Amery through Eddie; Denise poses as a reporter fact-finding on the Private Ear format and sees Don, who puts her with him whether he wants her or not. Amery’s clothes have gone to police forensics via Erica, and they put Eddie and his unwanted associate onto the moors and the Western Steam Preservation Society line; there was a train ticket in his pocket. Taking a trip on the line, the guard remembers Amery getting off at Westmoor, which they do as well as Eddie’s new beeper goes off. He phones in and Sonia has tracked down the milk truck. They see the owner and he tells them where Amery was coming from. It’s too far to walk; he starts to say they could use a helicopter like the one chasing him, but Denise cuts him off, asking if they could borrow transport. She gets a horse, Eddie gets a bicycle! They find the moorland building site, but there doesn’t seem to be anything left to help the case. Later Eddie, on his own but with Amery, starts to re-enact the camping trip. The prison work party arrive at the site, and Tom finds a note under a stone; "OK for tomorrow" it says. At Radio West, Denise is put out at him giving her the slip and she phones Daryl to let him know that Eddie’s found the site and is doing a reconstruction; she has taped her conversation with Eddie while out on the moors and plays some of the tape. Eddie leaves Amery on the platform while he buys the tickets; Denise shows up, but he makes it plain he doesn’t want her along. When he comes out, Amery has been kidnapped by Daryl. Back at the station, Eddie talks to Dr. Fischer as Denise takes her leave, much to Eddie’s amazement. Sonia is handed Denise’s mislaid tape recorder and hearing it she takes it straight to Eddie, who realises he’s been played for a mug. Don thinks Eddie’s overreacting, but a call to the station she said she worked for proves otherwise; now Eddie knows she’s behind the snatch. Sonia comes to the rescue though, as she’s seen Denise’s car. It’s a red beach buggy covered in sand, so Eddie goes to the nearest stretch of coast and after some searching finds tyre tracks. He follows them and finds the shack as they leave. Investigating, he finds Amery and frees him, but both are unaware that the shack’s phone is wired to explode. Amery is about to phone his wife, but Eddie sees the wires. They run for it, just as Daryl phones in; the shack explodes. They take the abandoned beach buggy and drive for the building site; Eddie’s twigged it has got to be the reason for this. When they arrive, Amery remembers what happened. The helicopter flies in, but Eddie grabs prisoner Tom as he makes a run for it. It looks like the others have got away, but later Eddie and Don find out that bad weather forced the helicopter down; you can’t beat the British weather!

With explosions, work parties and helicopters, this is about as near as Shoestring got to big budget stuff such as its opposition The Professionals on ITV. Director Jeremy Summers had worked on action shows such as Danger Man and The Protectors, so was more than comfortable at taking the show out into the wilds for action work. Alan David reprised his role as Dr Fischer, this time with a beard, and other guest artists included actor and children’s presenter Colin Jeavons as Ellery and George Roubicek as thwarted escapee Tom Laidlaw.

Although not officially billed as a Christmas special, The Dangerous Game fulfilled the function and closed the season on 21^st December 1980. Written by script editor Boucher – and unusually for the BBC given a credit for both jobs, a practice usually frowned upon – it begins on December 22^nd with a father and son, the Johnsons, opening and setting up the lad’s main Christmas-cum-birthday present, a futuristic racing set called Lunar Race 2000. As the boy puts the car on the roadway it explodes in his face, burning him badly. He is taken to hospital, but Mr Johnson doesn’t want him to tell what really happened, even though the lad could lose the sight in his eye. Eddie and Erica are helping deliver presents from Radio West’s Christmas appeal. Not happy with Johnson’s excuse, the doctor asks for Eddie’s help. The boy, Mike, muttered about a toy when sedated and she thinks if a dangerous toy did it with only two days until Christmas…? Eddie takes the point and goes to see Johnson, who won’t say anything to him and takes his wife to the hospital to see Mike; he’s already dumped the racetrack in the dock. Mike won’t go for his operation until he’s heard the record Eddie promised he’d get played; true to form he keeps his word. Erica has found out that Johnson’s got a police record, the latest for receiving stolen goods as a market trader. Eddie goes to see him working and finally gets it out of him that he bought it off a fellow irregular trader, a loner called ‘Taff’ who goes around with a bicycle and trailer; we see is working in the kitchen at a restaurant. Eddie goes to the local department store and sees Santa; in reality chief buyer Mr Lane. He identifies the maker’s logo as belonging local firm Wing Toys, run by Jack Wing, but they do not make electrical toys. Eddie goes to see Wing, who denies all knowledge of it and advises Eddie to be careful connecting his firm with faulty goods. That night Eddie goes looking for Taff but misses seeing him.. Next day, Eddie goes to see Don, who is visited by Wing’s solicitor who warns them off making any associations between his client and the toy. Johnson arrives with another racetrack; he got it from another trader who got four from Taff, so three are still out there. Eddie and Don test it; it also blows up and Don agrees to send out warnings while Eddie returns to see Wing with the evidence. All Eddie wants to know is how many there were but Wing does better than that – he shows him a warehouse full of them, or nearly so as one carton is empty. That means ten have gone and only two are accounted for. The police are on the alert, news bulletins carry warnings and Eddie goes checking every doss house for Taff with no luck. When he phones in, Sonia tells him the warnings have been stopped; Wing and his solicitor forbid them to continue naming the toy and the company. However, Don tells them that the news will carry announcements that they have been forced to stop because of ‘legal pressure’ - checkmate! The warnings start again and Eddie gets a break; shopkeeper Mr Patel bought four. He only has one, but has cheques for the other three with names and addresses on the back! As Eddie collects them, he talks to a Salvation Army band member, Norman, asks about the hostels and whether he might know Taff; he does, and tells him he won’t be using them as he has his restaurant work. Eddie sets off to track him down, but in the meantime Taff has left for the night. The owners reckon he’ll be drinking his Christmas bonus, so Eddie’s back to looking for him. When they come into work on Christmas Eve morning, Don and Sonia find Eddie slumped at her desk, a pile of racetracks behind him. With the other in the dock, there’s only one unaccounted for that Taff must have sold direct. He has – to the employers who have packed up and gone off for Christmas. They fail to hear the warnings, or Eddie’s plea that he puts out that morning on the radio. With no word through the day, Don takes Eddie to the lightship bar for the station party, but he’s in no mood to celebrate. Taff also is in no state; after drinking he rides his bike down a flight of steps and knocks himself out. Playing at the hospital, Norman spots Taff’s bike piled up in the car park and calls in. Eddie goes to the hospital, but Taff is out due to concussion and drink. The family arrive at an isolated house where they aim to have a quiet Christmas. They wrap the presents up and go to bed. Next morning, Taff comes to with all his marbles and finds Eddie slumped at the end of his bed. He tells Eddie who goes to the restaurant, but of course they are not there. However, the little girl was worried Santa wouldn’t find them and has left a forwarding address! Eddie grabs it and drives off to try and catch them in time. Typically for kids, they go downstairs early to find their presents; the young boy even intends to wire the plug himself! He does so, but is stopped from switching it on by the electric meter running out as Eddie arrives. He pulls out the plug and saves them all. Arriving at Erica’s she goes to give him her present, but after 48 hours frantic searching, the only present he takes is her best armchair to sleep in!

Starting with a bang and adding its weight to the usual ‘play safe at Christmas’ safety messages, the series’ final episode also features some notable guest artists including Michael Elphick as Pete Johnson, later of Boon and Harry, Celia Imrie as his wife Sheila, later of Bergerac and much associated with Victoria Wood for Acorn Antiques, Eric Richard as Taff, who would go on to be the mainstay of Sun Hill police station as Sergeant Bob Cryer in The Bill for the best part of twenty years and last, but by no means least, the mighty Burt Kwouk as Jack Wing, the best Asian/British supporting actor this country has ever had or probably ever will.

Building on solid foundations

The second series built on the success of the first, strengthening the lead characters and their backgrounds and as I’ve said, much was made of Eddie’s background within the episodes. Certainly in no way could the second series be said to be inferior in any way – and yet the ratings were well down. Why? Well, again we’ve said that for much of the first series Eddie was up against ITV’s blank screen, so phenomenal ratings for that should be taken into context; there was no way Shoestring would be able to repeat those up against any half-decent opposition. And that is what it got of course; The Professionals was into its fourth series by then and Bodie and Doyle made a formidable team. Both programmes went head to head and Shoestring lost out – but only just.

There is no way it was a ratings disaster; its average was around 11.7 million viewers, something any programme would give its teeth to have nowadays. The Professionals came out slightly ahead in the ratings and as such snuck into the Top 20 programmes more often than Eddie who only made it with The Dangerous Game. But this performance was steady, even inching up by half a million when the whole series was repeated mid-week in 1982 (the first series had most of its episodes repeated in a midweek slot in 1981 to a similar audience figure). Shoestring had plenty of mileage left in it and a third series was never in doubt as far as the BBC was concerned.

So what happened…?

However, it was not to be. After two years of playing Eddie, Trevor Eve decided not to return. Initially he went back to the theatre to work for Laurence Olivier, who liked his work in Shoestring and cast him as the lead in Hindle Wakes, part of a series of plays he was directing. Talking to Andrew Duncan in the Radio Times in 1998 Eve remembered "He was an immense support and guide, and helped me get a green card when I went to America in Shadowchasers, which was a forerunner of The X Files. It didn't last beyond a season, but I made a lot of money and stayed in America for a while. Both my sons were born there. (However) You can become quite disposable there. Put it this way: I don't have any regrets, whatever that means."

Doran Godwin’s television career failed to take off after Shoestring. She appeared in Rumpole of the Bailey in the Eighties and The Plant in the Nineties, and had a regular role in The Irish RM with Peter Bowles (recently released on DVD), but otherwise her career went back into the theatre. Liz Crowther’s tv career continued to flourish with regular roles in seires such as No Place Like Home, Tripper’s Day, Watching, French Fields, A Year In Provence, Family Affairs, The Bill and London’s Burning.

Michael Medwin continues to act on television and film, television roles including Minder, Boon, Call Me Mister (also for Robert Banks Stewart), Lovejoy, Holby City and only recently appeared in an episode of Doctors. His notable big screen roles include Staggered and Sean Connery’s independent James Bond picture, Never Say Never Again. At the age of 82, he still acts but has finished with the production side of the business.

That’s what happened to the cast; but what happened to Shoestring? Well, hereby hangs another tale which we won’t go too far into here. Suffice it to say that Shoestring series 3 was already pencilled into the schedules for 1981 and the resources were already set up for that sort of a show. When it was clear that no more episodes would be appearing unless the lead was re-cast, something which usually kills a series unless there’s a "believable" way of doing it (i.e. Doctor Who), the BBC basically looked to Banks Stewart and cried "HELP!" In 1999 he spoke to Doctor Who Magazine about his work on the series and Shoestring and what happened about its replacement; "I was in the privileged position of being asked what I'd like to do next. I thought back to a comedy pilot I'd written at Thames, about a German officer in Jersey who falls in love with a lady who runs a hotel, and there was something about this off-shore tax haven that clicked in my mind. After talking to the Jersey police, I invented this bureau within the force which dealt with millionaire tax exiles, tourists etc, and wrote the first script for Bergerac."

"We were nervous about the series, and it was jokingly called 'Jersey Five-O' in the beginning because of its high yacht and beach content. The press showing at BAFTA was terrifying, but our reviews were marvellous. The TV critic for The Times came by, tapped me on the shoulder and said, 'Quality, quality' and walked out. We were onto another number one series…"

But that as I said is another story. Shoestring might also have made it to the big screen had it not been for Eve’s departure; whether his leaving or the collapse of the commercial arm of the Rank Organisation (see RTS#26) providing the finance was the most instrumental in this final outing never being made is unknown. As a series Shoestring paved the way for a whole new approach for the BBC in its crime and police series, something which Bergerac owed much of its longevity to, and freed up the format for other series, such as Banks Stewart’s own Call Me Mister and even non-police/detective shows such as Lovejoy, to use successfully. Shoestring pretty much produced a new mould for others to follow, one that continues to this day.

Even now, we haven’t necessarily seen the last of the Private Ear. Interviewed by Andrew Duncan in the Radio Times in 2002 when his popular series Waking The Dead was due to return, Eve stated the following about the series that first made his name; "I'm a huge fan of the programme and I bought the rights. I saw the repeats [weekday afternoons in early 2002] and I could remember filming every episode. Every now and then I think, as does the BBC, of bringing it back in a two-hour film format, doing a "20 years on" thing. But it's not something I'm working night and day to do."

So keep that dial tuned to 329 metres; the Private Ear could return to the airwaves sometime in the future…

article copyright PPS / M.Hearn 2005