Escort

The job handed to the Task Force is the one every force dreads. An American senator is coming to Oldcote Parish Church, and it falls to the local men to see that he is protected and nothing untoward happens. Nobody treats it as a routine detail. Senator Alderton has been receiving threats for quite some time, and the reports say someone is out to kill him. The visit is set, the arrangements are expected to be perfect, and the whole weight of Thamesford CID rests on an afternoon at a church.

So the preparations begin, and they are thorough. Officers are assigned, precautions are taken, and the team walks through the day in advance, placing men, timing the moves, rehearsing the contingencies. This is hardly the sort of assignment that can be taken lightly. What the episode keeps coming back to is a bleaker point: there is no such thing as fool-proof security. The planning is careful and the vigilance is real, but absolute safety is a dream, and the squad has to accept that. The best they can do is be ready for the moment the dream breaks.

Elwyn Jones wrote it and Frank Cox directed. Stratford Johns is Barlow, Frank Windsor is Watt and Norman Bowler is Hawkins, with Walter Gotell as Chief Constable Cullen. David Allister's Jackson and David Lloyd Meredith's Evans are on hand, Susan Tebbs is PW Det. Con. Donald and Terence Rigby plays PC Snow. Jack Shepherd turns up as Rev. George Rowley, and Alan Gifford is Senator Alderton himself.

Protection work suits this show: quiet logistics, people pretending to be calm, and a threat you cannot see coming. And it is a reminder that policing, even at its most organised, is a gamble on what the other fellow does next. The senator gets his escort, the squad does its sums, and the possibility of disaster stays somewhere in the room.