And With What Measure?

PC Lincoln gets the tip, and the tip is a good one. A robbery at Hobbs Tailors, and Hawkins' team make two arrests on the premises, one more nearby, all without a fuss. By the standards of the series this is a perfect day's work. The trouble starts when the case reaches court and the defence accuses the officers of verballing, of putting words in a suspect's mouth and calling it a confession.

The subject, then, is the distance between a good arrest and a good conviction. Verballing was a live issue in the mid-seventies, and the episode plugs straight into it. Martin Jarvis appears as Mr. Davenant and Barrie Cookson as Mr. Jenson, with Basil Dignam's Judge presiding, and the courtroom scenes have the dry, adversarial snap that British television did better than anyone. Out of the witness box, Watt, Hawkins, Evans and the uniformed support, Snow, Lincoln, Perry and WPC Arthur, carry the procedural weight. The contrast between the confident arrests and the anxious aftermath is the whole point.

Elwyn Jones wrote it, Vere Lorrimer directed. The title, And With What Measure?, is a question pointed straight at the police, and the episode is honest enough to leave it hanging in the air. Nobody here is a monster. They are officers accused of taking a shortcut, and the show is interested in the difference between the accusation and the thing itself. Frank Windsor's Watt, Norman Bowler's Hawkins and David Lloyd Meredith's Evans give the inquiry its quiet authority.

It is a courtroom story told with the task force's usual restraint, and its pleasures are procedural: the wording of a statement and the timing of an arrest, the way a good case comes apart in front of a judge. That may not sound like much. But it is the kind of television that respects its audience, and this episode does, all the way through.