Paper Chase

Somewhere out there is a couple flooding the shops with fake one pound notes, and the note is a good one to fake: small, common, and easy to pass in a busy queue. The Task Force is on the hunt, and the case has the feel of a nuisance that keeps growing.

The episode takes a detour through the market square. Ben Fisher, a stallholder who has been handed the bad paper, decides he is not going to swallow the loss quietly. He tries to get his money back his own way, using the local dog track as his field of operations, and that decision puts him ahead of the police and into trouble at roughly the same speed. David Swift plays Fisher with the right mixture of injured pride and recklessness, and Paula Jacobs appears as his wife Leila, who watches the scheme develop with the resignation of a woman who has seen her husband's bright ideas before.

Behind them sit the familiar faces of the squad: Watt, Hawkins, Evans, and the uniformed PCs Snow and Knowles, played by Terence Rigby and Thomas Ellice. John Abineri turns up as Con Richards, completing a cast that feels like a small cross-section of the town. Elwyn Jones and Arnold Yarrow wrote it, Frank Cox directed.

The pleasure here is in the scale. This is not a gangland killing or a vault job; it is a couple knocking out notes and a market trader trying to beat the system at its own game. The dog track angle gives the episode its best scenes, as Fisher's amateur detecting collides with the professionals' slow, careful progress. It is a modest case handled well, and the show never looks down its nose at it. Petty crime still gets the full treatment, and that is worth something.