Choirboy

Vic Welsh is recruiting, and the job he is offering pays well: getaway driver on a job worth a hundred and forty thousand pounds. Welsh, the word is, has no record, which is how he has stayed behind a string of big jobs without anyone able to touch him. The man he wants is George Hartley, and Hartley, rather than taking the offer, goes to PC Snow for help. There is a catch, and it is a good one: Hartley needs fifteen hundred pounds before he will take the wheel.

Donald Sumpter plays Hartley with a wary, cornered quality, and Bernard Kay's Welsh is the smooth professional who makes crime sound almost reasonable. And Snow, of all the men in the force, is the one Hartley picks to confide in, which tells you something about both of them. The Hartley household, Pauline and young Andy, played by Elizabeth Hughes and Ashley Knight, gives the story its human weight, while Watt, Hawkins and Evans work the case and Snow carries the delicate job of looking after the man in the middle. Peter Welch's Det. Chief Supt. Harrison adds the official pressure from above.

Keith Dewhurst and Elwyn Jones wrote it, Gilchrist Calder directed. The episode is a study in the economics of crime: a fortune on the table, a small advance demanded before anyone drives. The show is good at this kind of story, where the criminals are not monsters but men making bad calculations, and the police are the other side of the same careful arithmetic.

The title suits the paradox at the centre of the whole thing: a man with no record, and a string of big jobs behind him. In this company, that is practically a clean sheet. It is a quiet, watchful episode, and the money at stake only makes the small human needs at the bottom of it look sadder.