Ministry of Accidents

Bill Dugdale needs help, and Bulman offers it one last time. The phrase one last time is doing a lot of work here, because this is the final episode of the series, and the show knows it. The episode wears its farewell lightly, which is the right way to wear it. The hour is built around the old patterns: Bulman lending his skills to Dugdale's troubles, Lucy McGinty along for the ride, the familiar machinery of a partnership that has had years to settle into itself.

Murray Smith wrote it, Brian Mills directed. Thorley Walters' Dugdale is the occasion for the episode rather than its engine, and that is fine. But the pleasure of the hour is the company: Don Henderson's Bulman, Siobhan Redmond's Lucy McGinty, and the quiet, long-standing relationship between the three of them. Walters, in particular, has made Dugdale something more than a recurring face, and the episode gives him a proper send-off without fuss. The three of them have earned the right to an hour that simply lets them work together.

The title sounds like a bureaucratic joke, a ministry for mishaps, which is as good a description as any of the work Bulman has done across two series. Accidents happen; someone has to be sent to investigate them. The title is the last in a line of good ones, and it fits the show's fondness for the machinery of officialdom. The ministry in question has been a two-person operation, and the show has never pretended otherwise.

It ends the way the series has mostly operated, without fireworks. A man helps an old friend, the case gets sorted, and the world carries on. That is not a weak ending. It is the honest one, and it suits a show that always preferred competence to spectacle.

The clock shop will have to manage without its proprietor. He never quite managed without the work.