No Life For A Woman

A woman's body comes out of the canal, and nobody knows who she is. That is the whole engine of "No Life For A Woman", and it is enough. Det. Sgt. Evans and PC Snow are handed the least glamorous job in policing: twelve months of missing person reports, read one by one, in the hope that somewhere in the paperwork a life shows up. The water has done what water does, and there is no hurry and no panic, only routine.

Alan Plater's name on the script tells you a lot about the tone before a single scene plays. This is not a whodunnit with a clever reveal. It is an exercise in doggedness, the slow matching of names to a face, and the quieter sadness of the cases where no report was ever made. James Ottaway's Thompson, Allan Surtees' Gates and Ralph Watson's Rawlings give the search a community to move through, and Elizabeth Bradley's Mrs Thompson and Jean Leppard's Helen Rawlings give it a heart. Every report is a story that ended somewhere, and the two officers read them the way other men read newspapers.

Elwyn Jones wrote it with Plater, Gilchrist Calder directed, and the regulars do their steady work: Frank Windsor's Watt, Norman Bowler's Hawkins, David Lloyd Meredith's Evans and Terence Rigby's Snow, with Thomas Ellice's Knowles in support.

The title is a verdict on the life more than on the investigation. There is no breakthrough to wait for, just the slow matching of records and faces, and the hope that someone, somewhere, reported her missing. But the episode has no hurry in it, and that is its point. It is the kind of hour that makes you check the credits twice, because the best scenes feel less written than overheard. For a series remembered for raids and punch-ups, this is a reminder that patience is its real subject.