A Day's Work

PC Snow gets a call from a school headmaster about a shoplifting racket run by the pupils. It is the kind of case that usually means a quiet word and a visit to a few parents. Meanwhile Watt is handed something bigger: a local building firm with fifteen thousand pounds missing from the accounts, a serious sum in 1974. The episode runs the two together, which is what the title is about. A day's work, of every kind. The two cases have nothing to do with each other, which is exactly the point.

The school business is small-scale and mostly humane. Snow does not want to wreck young lives over a racket, and the episode treats the kids as kids, which is more patient than some of these shows manage. The shoplifters are children who think they have got away with it; the auditors' losses are men who thought the same. But the building firm is the opposite: an audit that keeps throwing up new holes, and Watt's patience gets a proper workout. Hawkins lends a hand, Nesbitt does the footwork, and Gay Hamilton's Jean Watt appears in the domestic corner of the picture.

The supporting cast is a roll call of reliable faces: Denis Lill's Yates, Arnold Diamond's Forster, John Ringham's Bradley and Paddy Joyce's Davis. None of them is the star; all of them are the point, because fraud lives in the details and the details are people.

Elwyn Jones and Alan Plater wrote it, Lennie Mayne directed, and the Plater touch is all over the school scenes, which feel more lived-in than the average procedural.

It is a modest episode that knows what it is. No single big set piece, just two investigations running in parallel and a squad doing both properly. That is the appeal of the show at its most ordinary, and ordinary here is a compliment.