The Witness

An armed gang has taken a lorry full of Scotch whisky worth twenty thousand pounds, and Barlow and Watt are left with a robbery and a wall of silence. Twenty grand's worth of stolen whisky is a lot of money in 1972, and the squad feels the pressure to get it back. The episode is a study in patience. There is no dramatic raid to lean on; the drama is in the interview room, where Barlow works the suspects against each other to see who cracks first. The gang is armed, which puts a clock on the whole affair.

The method is old and reliable. Turn the pressure up on the weakest link, let the strongest believe the weakest has talked, and wait. Barlow plays the arrested men off one another with the calm of a man who has done it a hundred times. The psychological grind is the whole of the episode's interest. But the pressure rises in increments, and the cracks appear at their own pace, which is the honest way to show it. There is no point in shouting at men who have already decided to say nothing; the episode knows that, and it shows. Ron Pember's Wilf Taylor, James Mellor's Albert Dirman, Mitzi Rogers' Betty Taylor and Gordon Bilboe's Stan are the faces around the table, with Russell Denton's PC Grange and Heather Stoney's PW Det. Sgt. Green on the edges.

Stratford Johns' Barlow and Frank Windsor's Watt share the work in the easy, wordless way of partners who have earned it, with Norman Bowler's Hawkins and David Lloyd Meredith's Evans in support. Elwyn Jones and Allan Prior wrote it, David Maloney directed, and it went out on 25 October 1972.

It is a modest sort of episode, all pressure and no fireworks, and it makes a good case for the quieter arts of interrogation. Sometimes the witness is the last person who thinks they are one.