Twenty Seven Pieces Of Porcelain

The title sounds like the clue in a country house mystery, and in a way it is. Watt and Hawkins cross the Channel to Deauville in search of Clive Hornsby-Hyatt, the middle man who arranged a string of antique robberies on country houses. The stolen goods are the trail; Hornsby-Hyatt is the quarry, and James Faulkner plays him with the easy manners of a man who has never once worried about the price of anything. It is a two-nation case, and the paperwork alone must have been a horror. The houses are grand and the pieces are precious, and the losses linger.

What makes the episode work is the change of air. The task force is used to working its own patch, and France means foreign police, French procedure and the small constant friction of a job done in someone else's country. André Maranne's Inspecteur Paul André is the right man for that friction, polite and immovable at once, while Walter Gotell's Cullen keeps the home front watching and David Lloyd Meredith's Evans holds the fort. But the antiques are almost beside the point. What matters is what it costs to chase a thief who has never had to run.

Basil Dignam turns up as Sir John Mallin, Peter Harlowe as Archibald Fitzstanley, Janet Key as Dolly Wharton, and John Kidd's butler earns his single credit. Elwyn Jones and Allan Prior wrote it, Gilchrist Calder directed, and Frank Windsor and Norman Bowler carry the pair-work the series always did well: two men, one job, no wasted words.

Country houses, porcelain, a middle man on the Continent. It is a quieter caper than the show usually runs, but a pleasing one. The trip abroad gives it a holiday feel without letting anyone relax, and the small joke of the title is the kind of thing this series does when it is feeling clever.