Catch As Catch Can

Harry Hawkins has a name for it: Operation Ratcatcher. The rats are local, respectable, and very comfortable on the back of council contracts. The episode's quiet pleasure is watching the police go after men who are used to being on the right side of the law, at least as far as anyone can prove. The conspiracy is a web of favours and quiet percentages, and unravelling it takes a particular kind of patience. It is one of those episodes whose title you remember long after the plot has gone.

There is no chase and no gunplay. Instead there is the slow tightening of a net around men who thought they were untouchable, most of it paperwork and patience. Donald Pickering's Turnbull, Gordon Reid's Marshall and Anthony Collin's Purley are the faces of that complacency, and the three of them give the episode its menace, the polite kind that lives behind committee tables. It is an episode about the boring end of policing, and the show has always known that the boring end is where the truth lives.

Elwyn Jones and Arnold Yarrow wrote it, Lennie Mayne directed. Watt, Cullen, Evans and Stirling circle the operation while Hawkins steers it, and Nesbitt keeps the ground-level watch. Norman Bowler has the best of it. Hawkins built the ratcatcher, and Bowler plays him as quietly pleased with the work, which is the right note. Stirling, played by Warren Clarke, does some of the digging, and the younger man's eagerness is a nice counterweight to Hawkins' patience.

Corruption in local government rarely makes headlines. But it is the stuff of this series, and the episode treats it with the respect it rarely gets. The arrests are the point of the operation, though the interest is in watching the trap get set, and in the pleasure of seeing men who thought themselves above the law find out otherwise.