Once a Copper

Crabbe is assigned to work undercover at a country house hotel, where a police operation is under way. The establishment is one of the grander places in the area, and the officers running the operation are not cooks and do not understand what they are dealing with. Crabbe's cover places him in the kitchen, which suits him and does not suit the operation.

The case concerns a criminal who is expected at the hotel, and the police are watching for him. What Crabbe notices is that the hotel's own affairs are not what they appear: the food, the staff arrangements and the money are all quietly wrong, and the official operation is aimed past the thing that is actually happening under its nose.

The series' standard division of labour is present throughout. Margaret is at Pie in the Sky, minding the business and questioning the expense of her husband's principles, while Crabbe is away working a job that is not the one he was sent to do.

The solution is reached by watching the kitchen rather than the guest list. Crabbe's familiarity with how a professional kitchen works allows him to identify what is out of place, and the case closes on an understanding that the officers running the operation never reached. The criminal is found, but the episode's satisfaction is in the detective having been right about the place rather than about the man.

The first series uses the country hotel setting more than once, and this is the episode where the format's possibilities are clearest: Crabbe is put in a professional environment he understands, among people who do not, and his expertise is the method. It is a straightforward entertainment, built on the contrast between the standard of the food and the standard of the conduct around it, and it treats the restaurant as the place he would rather be.

It is one of the first series' clearer examples of the show's central joke — that a man who would rather be cooking keeps being the best detective in the room — and it makes the point without straining for it.

Because the operation's officers are drawn as competent people looking in the wrong direction, the episode avoids the series' occasional weakness of making the police merely foolish, and keeps the emphasis where it belongs: on the kitchen as a place where a different kind of knowledge is available.