Bank Rate

Some cases walk into the squad's lap with their complications attached. Danny Fitch works for Sara Jamieson, and Sara is the girlfriend of Det. Chief Insp. Hawkins. Fitch, meanwhile, is conspiring with Tom Rattery, a target criminal, to rob a bank in Thamesford. The bank belongs to Sara's uncle. It is the kind of coincidence that makes a detective reach for a second look at the file. A bank job aimed at a colleague's girlfriend's uncle is the sort of thing that keeps the file open late.

The question hanging over the episode is how far Hawkins is involved, and the show is smart enough to keep the answer from being easy. Everyone connected to Sara is connected to Hawkins, and every step of the case pulls the professional and the personal into the same room. Hawkins has to watch the investigation from a position nobody envies, and Norman Bowler carries that discomfort without ever saying it out loud. Angus Lennie's Fitch and Carl Rigg's Rattery make a nervy pair of conspirators, Jenny Hanley's Sara sits at the middle of it, and Jonathan Newth's Peter Warner and George Little's Morry Fine fill out the scheme. John Franklyn-Robbins' Chief Insp. Adler adds another layer of official scrutiny.

Frank Windsor's Watt, Norman Bowler's Hawkins, Terence Rigby's Snow and Thomas Ellice's Knowles work the case on the ground. Elwyn Jones and Arnold Yarrow wrote it, Frank Cox directed, and it went out on 11 October 1972.

Bank Rate is a neat title for an episode about interest of a different kind. Duty and family make bad bedfellows, and the professional entanglement is the real subject here. The robbery is the engine. But the tangle around it is the story, and the show has always been interested in what a case does to the people around it.