Half a Ton of Heartaches

A man's body washes up on the Northumbrian coast and is identified as Mr Patel, a worker on the North Sea oil rigs. The death is treated as suspicious rather than accidental, and Yelland wants it looked into without the investigation becoming visible offshore. He also takes the opportunity to tell Spender that the Newcastle arrangement is now open-ended. The fiction of a short secondment is finished.

Spender's route into the case is the trade he used to do the job in the first place. He goes onto the rig as a fitter's mate, hired for his hands and moving among the crew as a colleague, because a police officer cannot ask questions in a place like that. The episode spends real time on the working life of the platform: the shift patterns, the mess, the closed world of men who live where they work. Alfie and Stonker are the men he stands beside, and the drama comes from how much he has to be one of them in order to learn anything at all.

Patel's death turns out to be tangled up with drug smuggling running through the rigs and the coastline, and Superintendent George Ellis's position complicates the case on the police side. There is a deliberate disruption of the series' usual method here: Spender's one professional advantage is local knowledge, and out at sea he has none of it. Cut off from Stick, from Boyd and from the city he knows, he is working with nothing but his cover and his nerve.

What the episode really does, though, is pay for the job at home. While Spender is offshore and unreachable, his younger daughter Laura is seriously hurt. The series makes its first clear statement that his absences damage the people who did not sign up for them, and it does so without tidying anything: the investigation succeeds, the smuggling is exposed, and the accident is not undone by any of it. Denise Welch's Frances carries the reaction, and her position, a woman raising two children in a city where her ex-husband's work makes them targets, comes into focus.

The oil-rig location was ambitious for a British police drama of the period and the production got real value out of it. The weakness is the back half of the case. The step from establishing that the death is a smuggling matter to closing the operation down is not documented anywhere in the record, and the resolution arrives thinner than the offshore material deserved. Stick is barely used, because the location removes him. What remains is the arrangement the series runs on for the next two years: a man with something to lose that his work can reach, and a job that will keep reaching for it.