Ground Level

A housing estate going up on the edge of town is losing bricks by the lorryload, and somebody is making money out of it. Nobody steals bricks by accident; the organisation required is half the puzzle. Barlow takes an interest in the local firm that seems to be doing the stealing, and the episode follows the inquiry as it works through a trade that has made an art of looking the other way.

The appeal here is the size of the nerve. One brick going missing is a builders' yard joke. A lorryload vanishing every week means organisation and a market for the goods, and watching Barlow pick at that thread is most of the fun. He is helped by Sgt. Jackson and Sgt. Bob Evans, with PC Henry Snow doing the legwork and Jean Watt around to keep things human. Glyn Owen plays Logan, Alec Ross is Laker, John Hamill plays Wheeler, Mary Hignett is Mrs. Owen and Anton Darby takes Barker, a supporting cast that gives the estate a lived-in feel without cluttering the story.

Elwyn Jones and Alan Plater wrote it, and David Sullivan Proudfoot directed. Plater's fingerprints are all over the working detail, in the way the episode treats the building site as a place where people actually earn their living rather than a backdrop for a caper. That is the quiet pleasure of the piece: a modest crime, pursued at a modest pace, with no grand gestures required. The episode never raises its voice, and the inquiry proceeds the way Barlow likes: one interview at a time.

But the bricks matter. What the episode really tracks is how a small dishonesty spreads, one firm helping itself and a site manager deciding not to ask questions, until a whole estate is rising on stolen materials. Barlow treats it like any other case, which is precisely the point. Crime is crime, whether it comes with a sawn-off shotgun or a delivery note.