The Easy Job

Johnny Hicks is out, or so he says. The old face has apparently gone straight, and only Hawkins looks at him with the eyes of a man who has been fooled before. But the scepticism is warranted: Johnny decides to come out of retirement, and once a safe man starts talking about jobs again, the straight life was never going to hold him. The episode opens with the question of whether Johnny is telling the truth or telling the line he has told before, and Hawkins' disbelief drives the early scenes.

What should have been an easy wages raid turns into a nightmare for the gang, and nobody suffers more than the safe cracker, which is how these things usually go. The simple job becomes the complicated one, and the men who thought they were working a quiet morning find themselves in a mess that keeps getting deeper. Edward Petherbridge plays Johnny with the weary confidence of a professional who has heard every version of 'just one more' and said it himself.

Frank Windsor's Det. Supt. Watt and Norman Bowler's Det. Insp. Hawkins run the police side, with David Lloyd Meredith's Sgt. Evans and Brian Hall's PC Drake close behind. Barry Jackson's Frank Mason, Ron Pember's Eddie Smith, Maurice O'Connell's Morris, John J. Carney's Jimmy Davies and Velvey Attwood's Mrs Elton make up the world Johnny has come back to. Johnny's return is the sort of professional courtesy call that never ends well, and the episode knows it. Robert Barr and Elwyn Jones wrote it, Keith Williams directed, and it went out on 22 March 1972.

The title is the joke. There is no such thing as an easy job, only jobs that have not gone wrong yet, and this one makes sure the viewer knows it. The episode trusts its audience to enjoy the slow unwinding without being told how clever it is. Old habits, the show suggests, are just the shape of a life.