In the Bag

Why has the habitually lazy Paul Georgiou activated himself and acquired an informant? That is the whole of the published premise, and it is a better subject for a police series than a crime: the informant relationship is the actual machinery of plain-clothes work, and almost no drama of the period put it at the centre.

The question is also a character statement. Georgiou was introduced in the opening episode as the squad's idler, and an episode that turns on him doing something initiative-shaped is the series using its recruits' personalities as plot engines, which is how the show gets variation out of a fixed format.

Martyn Ellis's Georgiou is the subject, with Ian Hogg's Rockliffe as the sergeant who has to decide whether an informant acquired by the laziest constable is an asset or a liability. Six of the seven recruits appear and both senior ranks are absent from the cast record, which puts the hour's weight on the squad and its sergeant.

The guest cast is the reason to mention the episode's period flavour. Lonnie Donegan appears as Ferns, Elspeth Charlton as Mrs Duncan and Mark Dawson as Young Tierney. A skiffle singer in a 1987 BBC crime drama is the kind of casting the BBC did routinely and rarely does now, and it gives the hour a quality of the period that the estate locations cannot, since a recognisable face from outside drama carries a decade's worth of associations with it.

Don Webb wrote this episode, the first of five across both series, which makes him the run's most prolific writer after the creator. Derek Lister directed three episodes, all in 1987, and the production is unchanged: videotape, Kensal Rise, Canalot Studios, Leonard Lewis producing and Joan Campbell's and Paul Hart's theme, sung, over the titles.

IMDb records 6.4 from 6 votes, one of the two lowest figures of the eighteen, and as with every figure here the sample is too small to mean anything. What the number pairs with is the episode's subject matter: an hour about an informant is an hour without a crime to advertise.

Nobody recorded what Georgiou's informant produces or whether the arrangement survives, so the question the episode is built on stays open. What can be said is that the show understood that the least visible part of police work was worth an episode, which is a more interesting instinct than the one most of its contemporaries had.