Tough

The episode opens in court. Stick is the defendant and Spender is sitting in the public benches for him, which is the clearest single image the first series gives of what these two men are to each other. A police officer taking a morning off to watch his criminal friend answer charges says more about the arrangement than any amount of dialogue could.

After the hearing Spender befriends Mal Balmer, a former boxer, and the friendship is genuine on Spender's side. As he gets to know him he works out that Balmer is not quietly retired. He is fighting bare-knuckle for money, and the fights are being made for him by Kenny Coates, an unscrupulous promoter who has turned another man's decline into a living. The episode's subject is not really Coates, though. It is the difficulty of a man who wants out of an arrangement he cannot leave.

That is the problem at the centre, and it gives the hour a shape the surrounding episodes do not have. There is no crime to solve, only an arrangement to break, and the drama is Spender negotiating with Balmer rather than pursuing Coates. Balmer will not be rescued. He is physically capable and completely stuck, and the episode understands that a man who will not leave cannot be helped by being removed. Maurice Roëves gives the best guest performance of the first series here, holding both the capability and the entrapment without ever playing for sympathy. Geoffrey Hughes, cast against the comedy he was known for, makes Coates plausible and ordinary rather than villainous, which is more disturbing.

The episode is also the most domestic of the run, and it uses a second family as a deliberate mirror. Mal has a wife, Angela, and a son, Tommy, and Spender's own household is set down beside them: Frances, and the girls at an age where his absences have started to matter to them. Two houses with a man under pressure and children in them, one of them being broken by the pressure and one holding together. It is the first time the series asks what a man owes the people at home rather than what he owes the job.

It is, honestly, barely a police story. There is no evidence-gathering and no arrest of consequence, and the promoter is dealt with by intervening in a commercial relationship rather than by charging him. The hour rests almost entirely on the quality of the guest performances, and on Roëves and Hughes it stands up. The title's double sense, the hardness a fighter needs and the hardness of the situation, is the theme rather than a label. This is also the episode in which the audience finally learns the lead character's first name, six weeks after meeting him.