Briscoe

A uniformed branch sergeant named Briscoe is suspected of being crooked, and Bulman is assigned to establish whether the suspicion is justified rather than to confirm it. The task is not to catch him. It is to find out what has led him to be suspected of being dirty, and the episode takes that distinction seriously throughout.

Bulman's method is to go into uniform and onto the beat alongside the man. Working the beat with Briscoe rather than watching him from a distance is the point: he needs to see the job from inside the uniform to understand why a man wearing it might look compromised. What he finds is that an ordinary policeman's lot is not a happy one. The beat throws up situations the book cannot handle, and a uniform sergeant is the officer who has to handle them. The episode's argument is that the appearance of corruption and the fact of it are different things, and that practices which look suspicious when reviewed afterwards often make sense as the working compromises of a man doing an impossible job with inadequate authority.

Michael Byrne plays Briscoe, and the finding depends entirely on the audience believing him. He does not ask for pity and the episode does not offer a defence of a bent copper. The mediagems guide calls it a fine performance in the title role and treats the episode as mainly concerned with Briscoe's and Bulman's different attitudes to the same job, which is the right description: the two men are contrasted rather than opposed. Suzanna Hamilton, at the start of a significant film career, plays Judy Collins, the civilian at the centre of the pressure Briscoe is under.

This is not a whodunnit and it has no conventional resolution. There is no culprit and no arrest that settles anything; the finding is a judgement about a man's working life, and a viewer expecting the series' usual outcome may find the ending underpowered. The trade-off is a genuine structural idea: a plain-clothes sergeant and a uniform sergeant, the same rank, doing the same job differently, with no grievance left at the end of it.

It also leaves something behind that a case-of-the-week cannot. Bulman comes away with a grudging respect for Briscoe, and Byrne's character returns in Paying Guests, making him the only guest character created in Series 1 the production brought back. It is the clearest example in the first series of the programme's interest in policing as work rather than as adventure, and at 47 minutes it is the most heavily cut-to-slot episode of the seven.