Pop Goes The Weasel

The title is the spoiler, and the episode knows it. Slim Slaver and his band the Slavers are playing a gig at Elverton village hall to an audience of teenage girls who would do anything to see him. Halfway through the set, Slim is electrocuted on stage and dies, in circumstances the police find suspicious. Whatever the cause, the village hall has lost its headline act.

The investigation spreads out across the village. Watt, Hawkins and Cullen take an interest, Evans, Snow and Dodds do the legwork, and the local force contributes Chief Supt. Burns, played by Ivor Roberts. Around the dead singer move the people who knew him, Ronald and Howard and the rest of the band, played by Bryan Marshall and Neil Wilson, each with their own version of the night and their own reasons for keeping pieces of it back. The village hall is the sort of venue that smells of damp and floor polish, and the episode makes the most of the contrast.

Paul Nicholas plays Slim, and the casting makes sense of the screaming. The girls' devotion is rendered without sneering, which is more than the plot strictly requires, and there is a real sadness underneath the pop-star business when the idol turns out to be just a man.

Elwyn Jones wrote it and Kenneth Ives directed, and the episode has a proper whodunit shape underneath the pop trappings. An electrocution in front of a hall full of witnesses is a good puzzle, and the village setting gives the squad somewhere specific to poke around.

The deaths in this series are rarely tidy, and this one is not. But the episode is brisk and good-natured about it, which is the right tone for a story called Pop Goes The Weasel. It is one of the lighter entries in the series, and it knows it.