You Don't Have To Shout, I'm Listening

The title is the episode in miniature. Somebody needs to listen, and most people would rather shout.

The plot runs on two rails. PC Nesbitt and PC Dodds are sent to a disturbance at a garage and get attacked for their trouble by an employee called Masrur Jemal. Meanwhile Det. Sgt. Evans goes home and finds his wife dead and his child seriously ill. The two calls arrive in the same shift, which is how these things always happen. In the hours that follow, nearly everyone assumes Evans is responsible. Only John Watt refuses to join the chorus.

But that refusal is the heart of it. Watt listens where other men jump to conclusions, and the episode is quietly about what that costs and what it saves. For Evans the ordeal is domestic and private, and the show handles it without milking it. David Lloyd Meredith does some of his finest work as a man whose world comes apart in a single afternoon, and the scenes at the house have a stillness that the garage business deliberately lacks. There is no trial, no courtroom, just a house, a hospital bed, and the slow dawning of what everybody else is thinking.

The garage business, by contrast, is scrappy and small-scale, a mess of tempers and accusations that the uniforms have to untangle. Marc Zuber's Jemal and Renu Setna's Azmat Khan give the strand its shape, and Pamela Sholto's Mrs Hargreaves and Cyril Appleton's Mr Thomas round out the neighbourhood.

Elwyn Jones and Arnold Yarrow wrote it, David Sullivan Proudfoot directed, and Proudfoot lets the two strands sit side by side without forcing them together.

What stays with you is the quiet part. A colleague's life coming apart in front of the squad, and the one man in the room who simply listens. The title, for once, is doing real work.