Softly Softly: Task Force · S05E07
Night Watch
First broadcast 1973-10-24 · Warren Clarke as Det. Sgt. Stirling
Two crimes, one night, no connection: a filling station attendant marked for a revenge shooting dressed up as an accident, and fifteen hundred watches lifted in one go. Clarke's Det. Sgt. Stirling gets real screen time in the twin-track small hours, and the episode already has the instrument — the unhurried authority that would later spend fourteen years as Dalziel.
Softly Softly: Task Force · S05E08
Catch As Catch Can
First broadcast 1973-10-31 · Warren Clarke as Det. Sgt. Stirling
Operation Ratcatcher: Harry Hawkins's quiet campaign against local men made comfortable by council contracts, a web of favours and quiet percentages unravelled by paperwork and patience rather than chase or gunplay. Clarke's Stirling works the net tightening around complacency of the polite kind, the sort that lives behind respectable desks.
Softly Softly: Task Force · S05E10
Interrogation
First broadcast 1973-11-14 · Warren Clarke as Det. Sgt. Stirling
The story of what happens after two arrested men both insist it had nothing to do with them — and it happens mostly in rooms, bare and grey and patient, with the only violence the slow kind applied to alibis. Clarke's Stirling sits in on the process with no heroes in it: statement against statement, small contradictions saved up, until one confession comes out carrying the other man's name.
Softly Softly: Task Force · S05E13
Skipper's Walk
First broadcast 1973-12-05 · Warren Clarke as Det. Sgt. Stirling
The allegation is the worst kind: that Stirling himself is having an affair with the wife of a man Hawkins put away. Clarke's part becomes the subject — if it is true he has crossed a line no policeman should cross, if false then someone is building a weapon out of gossip — in an episode that moves at walking pace, the way a discreet inquiry should.
The Sweeney · S01E12
Contact Breaker
First broadcast 1975-03-20 · Warren Clarke as Danny Keever
A bank job with the hallmarks of Keever, a villain on weekend release who is behaving himself — and Regan and Carter smell a set-up, the only loose end a man available to blame. Clarke plays the framed man at the centre of the episode's engine, a personal grudge between Haskins and Keever from years back that procedure would happily see end back inside.
Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy · S01E04
How It All Fits Together
First broadcast 1979-10-01 · Warren Clarke as Alwyn
The Circus under weather, Smiley digging toward Karla, and Ricki Tarr coming apart in a way that forces the whole inquiry inward. Clarke plays Alwyn in the episode where the threads of disloyalty pull at everything — personal failings to bureaucratic oversight — in the BBC's definitive mole hunt, the kind of small reliable turn his career was built on.
Bergerac · S01E09
Relative Values
First broadcast 1981-12-13 · Warren Clarke as Guest star
The season's tidiest mystery, and one of the great before-they-were-famous guest turns in the series' history: an elderly millionaire poisoned after eating mussels he collected himself, an estranged heir convinced the housekeeper is killing his father, and the question of whether the alarm is genuine or paranoia. Clarke appears in the episode's circle of suspects around Geoffrey Bayldon's splendidly penny-pinching Henry.
Minder · S03E06
Another Bride, Another Groom
First broadcast 1982-02-17 · Warren Clarke as Ashmole
Arthur's niece is getting married, the limousine has been requisitioned to shift a load of magazines Arthur believed were books, and the magazines turn out to be pornography — whose owner is not the forgiving type, with a corrupt policeman circling for blackmail on the side. Clarke is Ashmole in the wedding-day chaos, a market day like any other in this part of London.
Bergerac · S04E08
Sins of the Fathers
First broadcast 1985-12-13 · Warren Clarke as Guest star
The fourth series at its most ambitious: a low-budget occupation drama shooting on Jersey, a German actor with gambling debts receiving threatening letters, a sabotaged stunt rope, and the island's real wartime memory woven through the present-day murder. Clarke appears in Tessa Coleman's script for Graeme Harper, an episode that keeps looking like an accident and keeps turning into something else.
Lovejoy · S02E03
Bin Diving
First broadcast 1991-01-20 · Warren Clarke as Brian Nun
The widow's house contents valued, then burgled, with the police deciding the dealer who just had the guided tour is their man — so Lovejoy works it out himself, allied with Brian Nunn, a remarkable bin man who knows what gets thrown away and who comes back for it. Clarke brings the same unhurried authority he would spend years as Dalziel to a man who has quietly made the town's rubbish his own, complicated by Eric's territorial diving habit.
Lewis · S04E02
Dark Matter
First broadcast 2010-05-09 · Warren Clarke as Roger Temple
An amateur astronomer and Master of Gresham College is found dead at the foot of the University Observatory stairs, and a college closes ranks behind a facade of politeness. Clarke is Roger Temple, the head porter in an institution everyone from tutors down to college scouts has a reason to keep quiet — with a college-wide blackmail plot and an astronomical conundrum running underneath.
Midsomer Murders · S14E06
The Night of the Stag
First broadcast 2011-10-12 · Warren Clarke as Samuel Quested
A government inspector goes missing in a village running a bootlegging trade, and the instinct to blame the men who make the stuff looks reasonable right up until the inspector turns up dead. Clarke is Samuel Quested in an episode where half the village drinks the product and all of it is shocked to hear it's illegal — the silence around the inspector's movements louder than any denial.