Return Match

Crabbe has to solve a series of thefts from lorries. He gets unexpected help from a private security firm called Troubleshooters, whose accuracy about the crimes is so good that it becomes the puzzle rather than the assistance. Crabbe becomes suspicious of how the firm came to know in advance about the thefts and concludes that there may be an informer within the police ranks selling Troubleshooters information for a reward.

Troubleshooters are due to play the police eleven in an important football match, and the fixture is where the two threads meet. Both teams have an ex-professional player. The police team's is Kirk Flowerbridge, who has a murky past and a liking for drink, and Fisher tasks Crabbe with minding Kirk and keeping him sober for the match. In the process of helping Kirk and managing the fixture, Crabbe identifies the informer, so the corporate-security side of the story resolves into an internal-discipline matter: the leak is a police officer, and the firm's uncanny efficiency was bought inside the force. The match is the occasion of the discovery rather than a separate comedy set piece. No source consulted names the informer, and this article does not name him.

The credited cast names Kirk Flowerbridge, Jim Cutler, Charlie Reeves and Terry Lees without assigning them to either side of the police and security divide, and the sources do not resolve that either. The restaurant strand is thin to the point of absence here: no source consulted records a restaurant subplot for this episode, and it is possible that the episode's second strand is the football fixture rather than a kitchen story, so the balance of the two-strand format should be confirmed by viewing.

Neil Stuke's Kirk is the episode's guest centre, an ex-professional footballer with a drinking problem whom Crabbe is given to mind and through whom Crabbe reaches the answer, which is the series' standard device of putting him next to someone in trouble and letting him work outwards from that person rather than inwards from the crime. Robert Putt's Chief Constable Braithwaite, Fisher's own superior, gives the episode its institutional dimension, because the police match, the private security firm's rivalry with the force and the informer within the ranks all sit inside a hierarchy in which Fisher himself answers to someone.

The episode's subject is the boundary between public policing and private security, which is the same subject as the Public Duties Squad itself. A private firm that solves crimes better than the police is doing so because a police officer is selling it information, and the episode treats that as a consequence of the force having started to compete with private contractors. It is the most directly ironic episode of the final series: the unit that rents out police work is investigating a company that is beating the police at their own job. The comedy is carried by the football fixture and by Crabbe's unwilling assignment as a minder, and the episode is unusual in the run for resolving its crime in the middle of a sporting occasion rather than in a kitchen or a station. Its theme has grown rather than shrunk since 1997, since outsourcing, private policing contracts and the sale of police information are all live subjects, and its argument about what a police force becomes when it competes for business is the most pointed in the series. The thin restaurant strand is its honest weakness, because the two-strand balance the programme depends on is not maintained.