An Innocent Man

Crabbe is asked to help an old friend, a butcher named Arthur Sharp, whose shop has been the target of a campaign of harassment. Arthur is a craftsman in the same way Crabbe is: he knows his trade, he takes it seriously, and he is being driven out. The attacks escalate, and the case becomes a matter of who wants the shop and why.

The pressure on Arthur is commercial. A property developer and a rival business have reasons to want a small traditional butcher's shop gone from a street they intend to develop, and the harassment is a means to that end rather than an end in itself. Crabbe's interest is personal from the start. He is not neutral about a man who cuts meat properly, and the episode lets him be an investigator protecting someone whose work he respects.

The restaurant's own supply arrangements run through the case. Arthur is a supplier as well as a friend, and the episode joins the two halves of the series more tightly than most first-series outings by making the case a threat to the kitchen's standards as well as to a man.

The solution is reached by reasoning about the value of the site rather than by any discovery of a criminal mastermind. The men behind the harassment are established, the campaign is exposed, and Arthur's position is secured. The episode's interest is in the pressure applied to a small trader and in the fact that the law's ordinary remedies are too slow to help him.

The series returns repeatedly to the same idea: that honest work in the food trade is under pressure from people who see only the commercial value of the land and the goodwill. This is the first episode where that argument is made about someone other than Crabbe, and it is the point at which the programme's interest in food as a subject rather than a hobby becomes clear.

The tone throughout is domestic and mild. There is no murder, the harassment is unpleasant rather than violent, and the comedy comes from the ordinary friction of a kitchen and a shop. It is a small story in which the series' values are set out without being stated.

The episode also shows how the series handles a victim who is not a victim in the conventional sense, by giving Arthur the ordinary stubbornness of a man who does not want to be rescued so much as left alone.