Set Us Alight

A fire goes through the headquarters of a radical political group, and the first person the police look at is the group's own organiser. It is the old rule of fires and families: when the damage is closest to home, start with the people who sleep there. Barlow does, and he soon finds the arson theory too tidy. The episode opens with smoke and accusation and sorts the two out slowly.

Jealousy turns out to be the stronger motive, and the key to the whole business is a privileged dropout, a figure the case keeps circling until it becomes clear that the man at the edge was never really at the edge at all. The episode gets a lot of mileage out of that shift, watching Barlow trade a dramatic theory for an uncomfortable human one. But the organiser is the obvious suspect, which in this show is usually the first reason to look elsewhere. The investigation moves from the obvious answer to the awkward one, and that is where the writing earns its keep.

Calvin Lockhart's Jake Johnson brings some star presence to the group, and the rest of the roster (Leon Lissek's Aaron Brook, David Griffith's Leslie Wilson, Ray Armstrong's Bill Faulkner and Sally Faulkner's Dorothy Anderson) never quite settles into type. Stratford Johns' Barlow works the case with Walter Gotell's Chief Constable Cullen looking in, David Lloyd Meredith's Sgt. Evans and Terence Rigby's PC Snow on hand, and Radar the police dog adding his silent commentary. Elwyn Jones wrote it, Geraint Morris directed.

The show was always good at this trick: a public disaster that turns out to be a private one. Fires get blamed on politics and arsonists, but the ones that do real damage are lit closer to home. The cast list gives the group a proper sense of a movement, speakers and hangers-on and people who joined for the wrong reasons, and Barlow picks through them with the patience the case demands.