Sunday, Sweet Sunday

Cullen hears a rumour, and a rumour is enough. A gang of skinheads, word has it, are heading for the coast on Sunday, so Det. Supt. Watt gets a special Task Force and a seaside town to wait in. Nothing may happen at all. That is the job: being ready for trouble that might not come, and holding a whole operation together while you wait. The assembled officers begin their work in the town as the weekend gathers steam, the way such operations do, with plenty of planning, plenty of waiting and the occasional test of nerve. But the weekend is the point, and the waiting is the work.

Watt runs the weekend with Evans, PW Det. Con. Donald, PC Snow and Insp. Atkinson around him. The local faces include Hughes, Stephens, Daley and Miller, and the town fills up with the particular quiet that precedes trouble. Watt coordinates the ranks and the departments, and the episode is content to watch a weekend's worth of police work happen in real time. The tension here is less about what happens than about when. A weekend of standing about, watching, and hoping the rumour stays a rumour.

Elwyn Jones and Alan Plater wrote it, and Simon Langton directed. Frank Windsor is Watt, Walter Gotell is Cullen, David Lloyd Meredith is Evans, Susan Tebbs is Donald, Terence Rigby is Snow and Michael Cooper is Insp. Atkinson. Donald Morley, Windsor Davies, Christopher Beeny and Michael Hawkins fill out the town as Hughes, Stephens, Daley and Miller.

It is a reminder of the discipline that policed this era of television, and of a drama happy to spend its hour on anticipation rather than fireworks. The seaside setting gives the episode a different light from the usual streets, and the menace reads as holiday trouble rather than city trouble. Sunday comes. Whether the skinheads do is a question the episode lets hang.