The Big Freeze

Major Roddy Maclean stages a burglary at his own house for the insurance money, a plan that would probably have worked if he had left well alone. Insurance fraud is a quiet crime; it wants no audience, and Hamish would have given it none. He has every intention of sorting the mess out quietly, the way such things are meant to be sorted in Lochdubh. But then DI Willie Bruce arrives, convinced a professional gang is behind the break-in, and the quiet solution goes straight out of the window.

Bruce instigates a full surveillance operation, which is a little like deploying artillery against a stray cat, and the village enjoys the spectacle enormously. The Major squirms under the attention while the police hunt for gangsters who do not exist. Surveillance descends on the estate, uniforms multiply, and all of it is for a crime that never involved any gang at all. Meanwhile Hamish and TV John wage their own small war against the new office computer, resisting the machine with the energy they would normally save for an unwanted relative. The great computer standoff runs alongside the main business like a domestic rebellion against the twentieth century.

Dominic Minghella wrote the script and Patrick Lau directed, with the episode going out in April 1995. Bill Leadbitter is a treat as the eager DI, all momentum and no brake, while David Ashton's Major Maclean does a fine line in dignified guilt. Robert Carlyle and Ralph Riach carry the computer subplot with visible despair, Brian Pettifer appears as Rory Campbell, Stuart McQuarrie as D.S. Cronk, and Anne Lacey, Alan Tall, Johnny Irving and Anne Kristen fill out the village.

There is something very satisfying about a fraud that grows into a full police circus through sheer force of misplaced enthusiasm. It is the episode where you understand why Hamish prefers his own methods: they cost less and they work. The insurance money was never going to be worth the paperwork.