Sweet Are The Uses Of Adversity

PC Snow sees a man leaving the flat of a prostitute, and does not act on it the way he should, and then the woman is found badly beaten. Snow is in hot water. Hawkins is under pressure, and the pressure has a shape to it: solve this one, and quickly, before it happens to someone else in the same street. By the time the woman is found, the man is just a description, and Snow is left holding the sighting. The flat is a small, specific place, and the beating inside it is the kind of violence the show has always done without flinching.

The investigation works outward from a small room. Hawkins pulls in Jackson and Evans, Donald and the rest, and the beating starts to look less like an isolated act and more like something with a next victim in it. The clock is the cruelest character in the piece. Everyone involved knows more than they are saying, and the job is to find the one person who will say it. The community around the flats knows more than it will admit, and the episode is patient with that silence, the way Hawkins has to be. And the episode keeps returning to that room, the way the investigation does.

Elwyn Jones wrote it and Ronald Wilson directed. Norman Bowler is Hawkins, who carries the episode, and Walter Gotell is Cullen. David Allister is Jackson, David Lloyd Meredith is Evans, Susan Tebbs is Donald and Terence Rigby is Snow. Alan Tucker plays Geordie, Ruth Trouncer is Miss Adamson, Del Henney is Parsons and Irene Bradshaw is Jennifer.

A contained, unpleasant crime, a community that keeps its mouth shut, and a detective with the sense to keep pushing. The guest cast give the street a lived-in quality, and the title's borrowed Shakespeare is the only flourish in sight. It is a joke the episode never quite lets you laugh at, and the last laugh belongs to the case itself.