Getting Away With It

"Getting Away With It" opens with a road accident and the unglamorous work that follows it: proving that the man behind the wheel was drunk when he did the damage. Inspector Kate Longton has to build a case against a driver who may be doing his best to slide out from under it, and the episode spends its hour on that grinding, procedural slog. The crash itself is over in seconds; the argument about it takes the whole hour. But there are no clever twists; the story belongs to witnesses and timings, and to the careful reconstruction of what happened before the crash.

David Curtis, played by Jack Elliott, and Jenny Curtis, played by Victoria Fairbrother, sit at the heart of it, caught up in the case's human side. Del Henney's Derrick Williams is the driver in the frame, and David Blake Kelly adds a second Mr. Williams to the paperwork. Around Longton the usual ranks turn out: Sergeant Joseph Beck, Sergeant George Parrish, PC Brian Kelleher and PC Danny Sparks, with Sebastian Abineri's Detective Sergeant Dick Maltby on the investigative side. The accident has left more than paperwork behind, and the episode keeps returning to that.

Don Webb wrote it, Adrian Shergold directed. Anna Carteret is Kate Longton, with David Ellison as Beck, Noel Collins as Parrish, C.J. Allen as Kelleher, Mark Botham as Sparks and Sebastian Abineri as Dick Maltby. Del Henney plays Derrick Williams, Victoria Fairbrother is Jenny Curtis, Jack Elliott is David Curtis and David Blake Kelly is Mr. Williams.

The episode is honest about how dull most real proof is. Nobody confesses to save time. Every detail has to be dragged out and checked, and Longton does the dragging. That is the show's quiet point: even a straightforward accident becomes a legal fight over what can be proved, and the driver's job is to make sure very little can be. There is no single moment of revelation; the slow grind of the case is the drama, and a man's liberty rides on whether the timings hold. Drink-driving cases rarely make for glamorous television; this one does not pretend otherwise. It is not the show's flashiest hour, but it is one of its most truthful.