Bearings

A passenger train has ploughed into the back of a goods train, and somebody saw it happen. That witness's account ought to be the backbone of any inquiry into the crash. Instead, the railway management seems content to ignore it, and Detective Chief Superintendent Barlow is livid. The rest of the episode is essentially his temper, unwinding in slow motion.

The episode is a study in institutional buck-passing. Nobody at the railway is openly obstructing the investigation; they are arranging it into a game of pass the parcel, each department handing responsibility along to the next. The harder Barlow pushes, the politer the responses get. Nothing moves. Watt and the others are left to work around a railway that seems to think co-operation is a weak position. There is no villain hiding in the wreckage, or none the police can see. The obstruction is a system that would rather agree to forget the witness than admit its own people might have been at fault.

James Doran and Elwyn Jones wrote it, with Frank Cox directing. Stratford Johns carries most of the weight as Barlow, glowering through corridors and interview rooms, while Frank Windsor's Watt works alongside him and Walter Gotell supplies the official presence as Chief Constable Cullen. The supporting ranks are familiar: David Allister as Sgt. Jackson, David Lloyd Meredith as Sgt. Evans, Roy Patrick as Insp. Pauley, Robert Aldous as Sgt. Lugton, Clifford Cox as Sgt. Graves, John Abbott as PC Martin, and Roslyn Slater as Mary Turner. Between them they give the railway men a great many official faces to answer to.

What stays with you is the quiet recognition that the worst obstruction is usually just procedure, wearing its official face. But Barlow can push against men; a corporation is another matter entirely, and the episode knows it. A grumpy, satisfying little study of how organisations swallow the truth, with one man refusing to let them digest it.