Grass

The safest house in the county, at least on paper, is the one holding supergrass Charlie Grant. Dodds, Perry and WPC Arthur are living with him, keeping him company and keeping him alive, while the details of seventeen robberies are written up and handed over. Grant has given the squad everything he knows, and the squad is giving him a new life somewhere else, eventually.

The trouble is family. Charlie's wife Maggie and son Terry turn up to make their feelings about grassing known, and they do it in front of the very officers guarding the witness. You can see the arithmetic change in Charlie's face. A man can live with betraying his old friends, apparently, but not with his wife and boy calling him a grass. He makes a break for it, and the episode becomes a race between the police who want him back and the people he informed on, who want him for other reasons.

Barry Stanton plays Charlie with the right shifty dignity, and Jill Gascoine, a few years before The Gentle Touch made her a household name, gives Maggie a quiet contempt that cuts deeper than shouting. Peter Duncan's Terry completes the family pressure. Watt and Hawkins supervise the mess, with Det. Insp. Alving, Robert Tayman, close behind, and the safe house starts to feel like the smallest room in England.

Tony Hoare and Elwyn Jones wrote it, Gerald Blake directed. The setting gives the episode a pressure-cooker feel: not much happens, and everything happens. And the title does a lot of work, because everyone in the room has an opinion on what a grass deserves, including the man who has just become one. The episode also asks a quietly uncomfortable question about what a promise to a grass is worth, and it does not pretend the answer is simple.