C.A.T.S. Eyes

C.A.T.S. Eyes was a British television series that aired on ITV from 1985 to 1987, produced by TVS. It spun off from The Gentle Touch, with Jill Gascoine reprising her role as Maggie Forbes. In this series, Maggie had left the police force to work for an all-female private detective agency called "Eyes," based in Kent.

The agency was actually a cover for a Home Office unit known as C.A.T.S. (Covert Activities Thames Section). The show was a hit, consistently landing in the top twenty most-watched programmes each week it aired. The first series aired on Friday nights in 1985, shifting to Saturdays for the second and third series.

The C.A.T.S. Eyes team originally included Maggie, a former police officer; Pru Standfast, a refined Oxford graduate who led the unit; and Frederica "Fred" Smith, a streetwise computer expert. Nigel Beaumont was the ministry official overseeing their operations. After the first series, the Eyes detective agency front was dropped. Pru was replaced by Tessa "Tess" Robinson, an upper-class but more frivolous character, and Maggie became the team leader.

The only other character from The Gentle Touch to appear was Maggie's love interest, DI Mike Turnbull (Bernard Holley), in the second episode of the first series, "The Black Magic Man," where he helped her on a case. Though they were still a couple at the end of The Gentle Touch, C.A.T.S. Eyes implied they had since ended their relationship but remained friends, though this was left ambiguous. In the first episode, "Goodbye Jenny Wren," Maggie mentioned her son, Steve Forbes, had moved to Australia, and that if he hadn't, she wouldn't have joined the organisation. Throughout the series, whenever someone called her "Miss," she would sharply correct them to "Mrs," a reference to her being widowed in the first episode of The Gentle Touch.

The cast included Jill Gascoine as Maggie Forbes, Leslie Ash as Frederica "Fred" Smith, Rosalyn Landor as Pru Standfast (series 1), Tracy Louise Ward as Tessa "Tess" Robinson (series 2–3), and Don Warrington as Nigel Beaumont.

Production

The series was filmed on location at the then-closed Chatham Dockyard, as well as sites in Medway and Maidstone. Post-production editing was done at the TVS Television Centre in Maidstone. Ford Motor Company loaned the cars used by the regular cast.