A Policeman's Lot: Part 3: It Depends Where You're Standing

The Jarman business reaches its third week, and the ground has shifted under the squad. Just as the case starts to look solid, the Task Force are warned off by higher authorities, which tells you two things at once: the truth is getting close, and it is inconvenient for somebody.

What follows is a week of questions without easy answers. There is a blackmailer in the picture, and a trashed coffee bar that is supposed to mean something. Somewhere behind both, the intelligence services drift around the edges of a case that stopped being an ordinary police matter long ago. Nobody has the full picture. But the men on the ground have to work out which of the official hands reaching down are helping and which are pushing them off the scent. The episode is at its best in the office scenes, where a warning delivered politely does more damage than a threat would. The men who have been told to stand down have to decide how much standing down they can actually do.

Stratford Johns' Barlow and Frank Windsor's Watt carry the weight of it, with Terence Rigby's PC Snow and Brian Hall's PC Drake doing the legwork. Frederick Treves' Commander Beevers represents the higher-ups, Peter Howell's Huntley and Richard Kay's Craig move through the story with their own agendas, and Patricia Heneghan's Mrs Jarman remains at the human centre of it. The Jarman household is where the case keeps returning, and it holds the whole story together. Elwyn Jones and Alan Plater wrote all three parts of the story, and Peter Cregeen directed this one.

It depends where you're standing, the title says, and by the end you are not sure anyone in the story is standing on solid ground. That is a fine place to leave a trilogy, out on the edge with the answers still moving.