Dorothy's Birthday

Watt gets a tip that a big Melbourne shoplifting gang is heading for Mosby and Kane's in Kingley, and the squad prepares accordingly. Surveillance goes up and officers deploy; the store is watched from every angle. The squad lives on tiptoe, waiting for the gang to show its hand. And at the end of all that preparation, the only person arrested is a petty shoplifter, a man with a complicated family life and none of the gang's polish.

The gap between the operation and the outcome is the joke, and the episode plays it beautifully. The surveillance itself is a small comic epic of waiting rooms and car doors. Thora Hird, a national treasure long before this, appears as Mary Meegan, with David Waller as Martin Meegan, and Jan Francis as Karen, David Daker as Walters and Pamela Sholto as Mrs Graham filling out the lives behind the shoplifting. Jan Francis, soon to be famous for Just Good Friends, is nicely cast as Karen. The big gang, presumably, went somewhere else, and the squad is left with one small, messy human story to make sense of.

Keith Dewhurst and Elwyn Jones wrote it, David Sullivan Proudfoot directed. Frank Windsor's Watt and David Lloyd Meredith's Evans carry the official side, with Dodds, Perry and WPC Arthur in support, and the episode keeps its scale deliberately small.

There is something honest about the let-down. Real police work is like this, full of operations that come to nothing and small cases that turn out to be the interesting ones. It is the kind of story the show tells best: the big operation that shrinks to a single man and the family that made him ordinary. And the title, Dorothy's Birthday, points at a private drama the episode keeps just out of reach, which is the right way to do it: some stories are only ever somebody else's. A quiet episode, and a good one.