Squashed Tomatoes

Fisher has restructured the police side of Crabbe's life. Crabbe is put in charge of a new Public Duties Squad, a unit that sells its services to the private sector and exists because of budget cuts. This is the change Fisher promised at the end of the previous series. Two constables are assigned to work with him, and the production's own synopsis is blunt about who they are: he is joined by two constables, both of whom have been sidelined in the force. They are PC Ed Guthrie and WPC Jane Morton.

Their first job is to guard a new housing development that has been subject to vandalism. Nearby villagers claim that one of the houses has been built in the path of a centuries-old right of way. The assignment is a security contract rather than an investigation, and the episode's interest lies in Crabbe refusing to treat it as one. Villagers, developers and contractors are all involved, and the sources record that quite a few contractors have not been paid, including the old security team, so that the dispute over the right of way turns out to be connected to the vandalism. Crabbe is doing police work while nominally being a night watchman, and Fisher is irritated that he is, which is the new format's defining joke: a detective's method applied to a commercial security contract. No source names the person responsible for the vandalism, and this article does not supply one.

On the restaurant side, Nicola has left and Gary is unhappy, missing her. The new waitress, Sally, gets the cold shoulder from him. Henderson, meanwhile, is in trouble for growing and selling varieties of tomatoes not approved by the EEC, which is the episode's title.

The episode's main job is to establish the new arrangement, and the way it does so is to show Crabbe resisting it. He does not want to be a security contractor, he does not want two officers foisted on him, and he solves the crime anyway. That reluctance is the character's continuity, restated in a new key. Morton and Guthrie are introduced as a pair and as the officers Crabbe has been given rather than chosen, and the billing's use of uniform ranks rather than detective ranks marks the change explicitly: the departing Cambridge was a detective sergeant, and her replacements are a WPC and a PC, which is a downgrade in rank and a change in the kind of help he gets. Nicholas Lamont's Gary gets his main material from Nicola's absence, and Sally's position is made clear from the start, since the staff's loyalty to her predecessor is the obstacle she has to work against.

The reset is the theme. A detective who has spent four series trying to leave the police finds himself running a unit that rents out police services to private business, which is a sharper joke about the 1990s public sector than the series had attempted before. The two strands still run in parallel and do not touch, but they now share a subject: cuts at the station and a new arrangement at the restaurant are both about budget and change. The story of a public police force selling its services into the private sector, complete with unpaid subcontractors and a planning dispute over a right of way, has aged into a more pointed subject than it was in 1997.