The Removal

The tip-off reaches Watt thin and incomplete: a big domestic robbery is coming, but most of the detail is guesswork. What he has is a feeling and a time frame, and he passes the problem down the line. Whether Evans and Snow can find the right house before the men turn up is the whole hour, and it is enough.

The episode keeps its attention on the search: Evans and Snow working the streets with a description that barely qualifies as one, while a family prepares for a New Year they will not forget. The Albert household, Sybil (Stephanie Bidmead) and Tom (Paul Aston), is the one at risk, and around the search move Benny Garbutt (Graham Weston), Jackie Turner (Johnny Briggs) and Sammy (Hugh Sullivan), supplying the local colour. The race is the fun of it, the way a race against a clock always is, and the house and the gang stay on separate courses until the last minute.

Frank Windsor leads as Watt, Norman Bowler's Hawkins directs the search from above, and David Lloyd Meredith's Evans and Terence Rigby's Snow do the legwork, with Heather Stoney's Det. Sgt. Green in support. Elwyn Jones and Allan Prior wrote it, Philip Dudley directed.

The title turns out to be apt: this is a story about a house being stripped, and about the race to be there first. The New Year setting gives it a particular chill, the way a celebration makes the threat of an empty house feel sharper. It is a modest, well-made hour built on a simple question. And the family at the centre of it gets the answer they deserve, whether the squad would call it luck or good policing. It is a story of timing, which is a very police way of telling a story. A clean, tense hour.