Any Other Night

It is New Year's Eve, the last day of 1969, and Chief Constable Cullen has taken on the thankless job of persuading the four division chiefs of Thamesford Constabulary to bury their hatchets long enough to get along. The animosity is old and mutual, and the party mood is doing nobody any favours. Then a van load of tyres, worth several hundred pounds, is stolen from the police compound itself. Stealing from a police compound takes nerve, or stupidity, or both.

But the celebration is over. The CID task force, which had other plans for the evening, is back on duty, and the last crime of 1969 needs solving before the year turns. Cullen's peace conference and the theft collide, which is presumably not what he had in mind for the night. The party hats go back in the drawer.

Robert Barr and Elwyn Jones wrote it, Peter Cregeen directed. Stratford Johns is Barlow, Norman Bowler Hawkins, and Walter Gotell's Cullen presides over the wreckage of his evening. David Lloyd Meredith plays Sgt. Bob Evans, David Allister Sgt. Richard Jackson and Terence Rigby PC Henry Snow. The division chiefs are Basil Dignam's Chief Supt. Marshall, Michael Hall's Chief Supt. Conlow, Nicholas Brent as Chief Insp. Walters and Tony Caunter as Insp. Cox. Somewhere in the crush of uniforms, the job gets done.

It is a neat piece of timing, a New Year's Eve story that lets the show have its party and its investigation at once. The departmental bickering supplies most of the friction; the stolen tyres just give everyone an excuse to keep working. It is the sort of story the series does well, work intruding on life at the worst possible moment, and nobody rings in the new year the way they planned. That is probably the most accurate thing in the episode.