Crime and Punishment

Somewhere in the country there is a village that has decided to police itself. The Bleakridge Watch patrols the streets of its remote corner of England, exposing anyone who steps outside the law and making a virtue of telling on your neighbours. The village has clearly decided that the official police are not up to the job, and it is proud of the arrangement. It is the sort of community project that sounds wholesome right up until one of its members dies.

Barnaby and Jamie Winter arrive to find a village that has an opinion on everything and a witness for every hour of the day. The Watch's members are certain of themselves and certain of the rules, which makes the murder inquiry a slow business of working out who was really in charge. Ingrid Lockston, Cecily and Felix Hope, Mitch McAllister, Lena Ferrera and Azeem Meer all orbit the group, and every one of them has a reason to keep the Watch's business out of the police station.

The episode is really about power: who has it, and what people will trade for it. Barnaby's patience wears down the certainty eventually. Nobody in the Watch counted on being investigated with the same thoroughness they applied to everyone else, and the death was probably a long time coming in a place this watchful.

Paul Logue and Caroline Graham wrote it, Renny Rye directed. Neil Dudgeon and Nick Hendrix are the investigating pair, with Fiona Dolman and Manjinder Virk in support. The Watch and its neighbours are played by Frances Barber, Marty Cruickshank, Clive Swift, Neil Morrissey, Katy Cavanagh-Jupe and Emilio Doorgasingh, and Clive Swift, familiar from a lifetime of television, is a particular pleasure.

It is an uncomfortable episode in the right way, a study in self-appointed righteousness. And it leaves you with a different question: how a village convinced itself that watching was the same as caring.