Silver Lining

The unit is given a betting racket, and the way in is the working end of the gambling trade. Bulman takes a job in a betting shop as a bookmaker. Doran finds employment in a tipster's office. Between them they sit inside both the money and the information, at the points where selections are produced, sold and acted upon.

The method is the series' standard one, but this is the first episode to run it twice at once, and the first to give Doran an undercover assignment of her own rather than a position alongside Bulman. That matters across the rest of her time on the series. Between the betting shop and the tipster's office the case turns out to be race fixing rather than ordinary fraud, and it is broken up from the inside.

Race fixing is a crime without a victim on screen. It is privileged knowledge used against the betting public, and the episode's method reflects that: the unit does not chase offenders, it works a trade until the improper flow of information becomes visible. The title carries the sense that a racket presents itself as a legitimate business proposition, which is the moral shape of white-collar crime in the drama of the period. The setting is period-specific in a useful way. Betting shops had been legal in Britain only since 1961 and were a familiar high-street presence by the late 1970s, and horse racing was one of the few sports with a mass betting public.

Hywel Bennett leads the guest cast as Jack Slater and it is the strongest guest casting of the first series. Bennett was a significant British film actor of the period, shortly to become a television lead in Shelley, and his presence gives the criminal establishment a proper face. Judith Barker and Peter Armitage, both Granada regulars, give the guest side a consistent northern feel.

The best use of Bulman is the cover itself. A bookmaker takes money from people and has to be right about horses; an eccentric, glove-wearing policeman doing it under cover is a joke the episode plays straight, and it fits his habit of being memorable in a way people do not take seriously. Frances Tomelty carries the tipster's office end as a working officer. Dennis Blanch is not in the billed cast, which was normal in Series 1, where few episodes used all the regulars.

The limitation is that the subject restricts the episode. With no victim on screen and no equivalent of the opener's hostesses or Duty Roster's institutional friction, the emotional stake rests on the guest performances. It is also one of the episodes the 1980s repeats passed over, which is why it is comparatively hard to find.