Sprats And Mackerels

A whisper from the north of England sends the Task Force down to Eastcote Docks, where someone is said to be bringing illegal immigrants into the country. It is the kind of rumour that could go nowhere, but a domestic dispute at the nearby caravan site at Bathgate gives the team a second thread to pull. The question is what links the two. The docklands have their own quiet menace, and the episode makes good use of it.

Betty Donald goes undercover at the docks, posing as a juvenile delinquent. Jackson, meanwhile, is given the quieter assignment at the camping site. But then the investigation stops being patient: a group of abandoned immigrants has to be located before they end up dead, and the search turns into a race against time. The abandoned people are the story's conscience, and the script never lets them become a statistic.

Elwyn Jones wrote it, Peter Cregeen directed. Frank Windsor is Watt, Norman Bowler Hawkins, with David Lloyd Meredith as Sgt. Bob Evans, David Allister as Sgt. Richard Jackson, Susan Tebbs as Betty Donald and Terence Rigby as PC Henry Snow. Gay Hamilton plays Jean Morrow, Ewan Roberts is Chief Preventive Officer Prentiss, Christopher Benjamin Chief Immigration Officer Ingrams, and Joe Gladwin appears as Calder. Two undercovers, two locations, one deadline.

The title is the giveaway: sprats and mackerels, small fish and big fish, and the trick is telling which is which before the net comes in. It is satisfying television when an apparent coincidence turns out to be the whole point, and the docks and Bathgate turn out to be pieces of the same picture. The chase gets its weight from the people at the centre of it, who are running out of time before anyone even knows their names. It is a well-built hour with a cold title and a warmer heart.