Collation

Collator Sgt. Jackson does his job, which sounds dull and is not. He charts the small crimes of the district, pins the pattern down, and lays the result before Det. Supt. Watt. The picture is not dramatic, but it is damning: a district being slowly eaten by a thousand petty offences, none of them worth a headline on their own. The collator's chart is the quiet weapon of the piece, a large number of small crimes set down in order and suddenly visible as a single shape. Jackson's job title is the clue: collation, the bringing together of bits until they mean something.

What Watt and Barlow build from that chart is a campaign of zero tolerance, an attempt to take the district back offence by offence. The episode is refreshingly honest about where police work begins. It starts in a filing system, and the chart is the hero. Zero tolerance sounds like a slogan, but the episode is careful to show the work behind it, street by street, and the campaign spreads outward through the people caught in it, from Mrs Russell and Mrs Porter to Oddy, Marsh and young Timothy Brown.

Elwyn Jones wrote it and David Sullivan Proudfoot directed. Stratford Johns is Barlow and Frank Windsor is Watt, with David Allister as Jackson and David Lloyd Meredith as Evans. Gay Hamilton is Jean Watt, Bay White is Mrs Russell, Marigold Sharman is Mrs Porter, Henry Knowles is Oddy, James Drake is Marsh and David Arnold is Timothy Brown.

An episode about paperwork should not work as drama, and it nearly does not, which is part of its charm. It believes that record-keeping is a form of courage, and it makes a decent case that the boring parts of the job are where policing is won or lost. The small crimes add up, and so do the small victories. And the episode is a small reminder that the show's favourite subject was always the unglamorous middle of police work.