The Raider

A post office van, six men, fifty thousand pounds. That is how "The Raider" starts, and it is the sort of crime that makes the papers and then goes cold. The van never stood a chance. Only one of the six is caught: Danny Darby, the hired muscle, arrested because he used a gun. Graham Weston plays him as a man who was never going to be the clever one in the room, and when he finally gives up a name, it is the wrong kind of lead.

Johnny Warren, he says. Escaped villain. Except nobody has seen Johnny Warren for two years, and the name might be a gift, or a very careful piece of mischief. The episode settles into the follow-up, the unglamorous work of chasing a two-year-old trail, and it is the kind of hour the series always did well: one arrest, one name, and a week of patient digging. But the trail is cold, the witnesses are gone or unwilling, and the file is thin; it is exactly the sort of case that eats men's careers.

James Mellor's Jackie Warren, Coral Atkins' Marge Gregson, Deborah Brayshaw's Billie Wyatt and Richard Steele's Tom give the investigation people to talk to. Elwyn Jones and Allan Prior wrote it, David Maloney directed, and the regulars, Watt, Evans, Snow, Knowles and Nesbitt, do what they do best. It is a cast full of faces you will recognise from a hundred other episodes of British television, which is a compliment of a particular kind.

The robbery is over in minutes. The case lasts the whole hour, and the point of the episode is that the second part is the harder part. Darby's one name may lead nowhere, but the digging is the job, and the episode makes you feel both halves of that truth.