The Cut

The Cut starts small, with a series of video thefts, and spends its hour proving that small is never where these things stop. The missing tapes pull the investigation into something considerably darker, and Inspector Kate Longton and her team find themselves working a crime that started as shoplifting and ended as something else entirely. For a town like Hartley, a stolen video was a household disaster, and the episode knows it. It is a classic structure, executed with care.

The Griffiths family are in the middle of it: Karl Howman's Billy and Bridget Lynch-Blosse's Anne, with Stephen Bent's Colin Plant supplying the local colour. Every tape traced is a thread pulled, and the threads lead somewhere nobody planned for. Longton works with Sergeant Joseph Beck, Sergeant George Parrish, PC Brian Kelleher and PC Danny Sparks, while Detective Chief Inspector Mark Perrin (Edward Peel) and Det. Sgt. Terry Thorpe, played by Geoffrey Morgan, handle the senior end. The Griffiths' side of the story keeps the human cost in view while the police work the bigger picture.

Don Webb wrote it, Graeme Harper directed. Anna Carteret is Kate Longton, with David Ellison as Beck, Noel Collins as Parrish, C.J. Allen as Kelleher, Mark Botham as Sparks, Edward Peel as Perrin and Geoffrey Morgan as Terry Thorpe. Karl Howman plays Billy Griffiths, Bridget Lynch-Blosse is Anne Griffiths and Stephen Bent is Colin Plant.

There is a particular pleasure in watching a procedural find the serious crime hiding behind a boring one, and The Cut does it without hurrying. The thefts are never dismissed. But they are just followed until they lead somewhere worse. The episode trusts its audience to keep up, which is always welcome. The ending lands where it should, with the small thefts looking smaller than ever. It is the kind of episode the series does in its sleep, and does well. A tidy, satisfying hour about the size of the step from petty to serious.