Pork Pies

Fisher sends Crabbe and the squad to a meat factory where animal rights protesters are demonstrating against the owner, a man named Trubb. The issue is Trubb's use of veal in his Trubbs' Thunderbolt sausages, which is what the protesters are objecting to.

Crabbe then makes a discovery that inverts the whole dispute. The sausages contain soya and are wholly meat-free. There is no veal in them at all, and the product being defended and attacked by turns is not what either side believes it to be. The episode's title is the joke: a pork pie need not contain pork.

The squad's job is the protection of the factory and the management of the protest, and what Crabbe establishes is that the labelling and the product are fraudulent. The criminal matter is therefore the food itself, the misdescription of what is being sold, rather than the demonstration, and the animal rights campaigners turn out to have been protesting about something that was not happening in the way they thought. The episode closes on Crabbe's surprise at the finding rather than on an arrest, and the sources do not record an arrest, a prosecution or any other consequence for Trubb.

On the restaurant side, Margaret is concerned when her friend Julia, a wealthy widow, falls for a pilot much younger than herself and agrees to finance a bucket shop for him. This is the series' familiar pattern on the restaurant side: a supply or business relationship that a member of the household has entered into on the strength of personal feeling, and which Crabbe then has reason to distrust. Julia's money is going into a venture whose operator is charming and whose prospects are doubtful. Whether Anthony Neale proves to be a fraudster is not established in the sources, and it is not settled here.

The script gives Crabbe the discovery rather than the arrest, and Richard Griffiths plays it as a professional's offence at misdescribed food rather than as moral outrage at the protesters. The scene in which he establishes what is actually in the sausage is the episode's central moment, and it is a cook's reaction as much as a detective's. Sheila Gish's Julia gives Margaret a friend with money and poor judgement, which is a role the series had not previously built for her, and Margaret's scepticism about other people's romantic decisions, a repeated character note, is turned here on someone she likes.

The episode is the clearest example in the run of the series' argument about food as a subject of moral seriousness. A sausage that contains no meat is, in this show's terms, a fraud before it is a crime, and Crabbe's authority on the question comes from the kitchen rather than the badge. The animal rights protest is set up as the story's conflict and then deflated: the real offence is committed by the man the protesters are protesting against, but not in the way they believe. The two strands do not touch but they rhyme, since Julia's bucket shop is a venture built on charm and misrepresented prospects and Trubb's sausages are a product built on charm and misrepresented contents. Both are about people being sold something that is not what it appears to be. The campaigners are used as a comic obstacle rather than as people with a position, and a modern viewer will notice how little the episode engages with what they were actually objecting to.