Good Touches

PC Drake has noticed something: the same houses get burgled again and again, usually the same people, the ones everybody knows are vulnerable. The theory is simple, and it holds: a house that has been hit once is a house that will be hit again. He and Hawkins build a scheme around it, a quiet watch on the properties most at risk, and they give it a name with a smile in it: good touches. It is the kind of idea that sounds too soft for a police series and works precisely because it is soft: the squad as a neighbourhood watch with a badge.

For Mrs Spender (Libby Glenn), the timing is everything. But she is exactly the kind of household the scheme was built for, and the episode makes clear that their help cannot arrive a moment too soon. Around her move Sam Lester (Anthony Collin), Helen Morris (Elaine Mitchell), John Tyler (Donald Eccles) and Dave Venner (Roger Gale), the usual small cast of neighbours and hangers-on.

Norman Bowler's Hawkins and Brian Hall's Drake are the heart of the episode, with Terence Rigby's Snow and Julie Hallam's Forest in support. Elwyn Jones and Arnold Yarrow wrote it, Frank Cox directed.

The episode's argument is a gentle one: prevention is police work too, and a neighbourhood that watches out for itself is harder to rob. It is a warmer, more sociable hour than the season's usual fare, closer to community care than to a manhunt, and the squad wears the change well. The good touches work, which is the point, and the woman they were built for gets her proof in time. A small kindness of an episode. Nothing about it shouts, which is the point of the title: good touches are quiet, and so is the hour that earns them.