Amenities

The site of a new office development has been vandalised, and Inspector Jean Darblay has to find out who wants progress stalled and why. Amenities is the kind of case the show could do in its sleep, and it does it well: a crime scene with no body, no robbery and no shortage of suspects with reasons to be annoyed.

The physical damage is the easy part. The hard part is the people attached to the project, and the episode works its way through them with the patience of a proper inquiry. Mr. Rennick, Ken Prescott, Mrs. Bolt, Peter Whittle and Ernie Wakeman each have their connection to the site and their opinion of what is being built on it, and a Lorry Driver who happened to be in the area may hold the timing of the whole business in his head. Darblay sifts the fragmented accounts with Sergeant Joseph Beck and Sergeant George Parrish beside her and PC Peter Sims doing the groundwork, trying to decide whether the vandalism was petty mischief or something calculated about the development itself.

William Humble wrote it, Peter Moffatt directed. Stephanie Turner is Jean Darblay, with David Ellison as Beck, Noel Collins as Parrish and David Gillies as PC Peter Sims. George Little plays Mr. Rennick, Richard Hampton is Ken Prescott, Rosalind Elliot is Mrs. Bolt, Brian Darnley is Peter Whittle, Alan Cullen is Ernie Wakeman and Tony Vasgo is the Lorry Driver.

The episode's pleasure is in the accumulation of small things: a word here, a grudge there, a piece of timing that does not fit. Nothing in it is flashy, and that is the point. Real inquiries are built out of interviews and observations, and the show trusts the audience to enjoy watching that happen.

It is a solid, comfortable hour, the kind where familiarity and fresh puzzles sit side by side. Progress, the episode gently notes, always makes somebody angry.