Duty Roster

A postman is mugged and his mailbag taken. It is the kind of job a specialist unit is given precisely because it is beneath them, and the episode spends its first act making clear how little anyone expects from it. Then the enquiry widens, because the unit asks the questions the routine assignment does not require.

What the stolen material was for turns out to matter more than who took it, and the small crime opens into a much larger criminal operation. Thematically this is the plainest procedural in Series 1: a single widening investigation rather than two cases converging, and the nearest the first run comes to a conventional police drama. It is also the episode that establishes Rainbow's exasperation as a repeatable device. David Hargreaves plays the superior officer as a competent policeman with a legitimate complaint rather than as a fool, which makes the friction institutional rather than personal. A specialist unit given a minor job should not turn it into a major operation without consulting him, and he is right about that. His departure at the end of Series 2 removes the series' best foil.

There is a class dimension the episode does not labour. A postman is attacked, and the official instinct is that the attack does not matter much, which is exactly why the larger case underneath it goes unnoticed until officers with no stake in the local order start pulling at it.

Don Henderson is quieter here than in the pilot. He is the officer who asks the unnecessary question, which is a subtler demonstration of his usefulness than the opener offers, and the eccentricity reads as a method of getting people to talk rather than as decoration. Dennis Blanch does the legwork and the conventional police work, and the pairing comes across as a working partnership rather than a double act. The rotation of the regulars is visible: this is a Bulman and Willis episode, with Doran credited but peripheral and Singer in support.

The honest limitation is that once the case opens out, the execution is routine. It is the least distinctive instalment of the first series in character terms, and the resolution is a conventional break-up of a criminal operation. Its ending is a character result rather than a plot result, which is more than most of the run manages. It is also one of the episodes the mid-1980s repeat run skipped, because the repeats showed only the Bulman-led stories, which makes it among the least-seen parts of Series 1.