You Can't Win Them All

The squad investigates a widespread fraud against banks, and the fraud is organised across more than one city. Three con men move between bank managers in Edinburgh, Coventry and Liverpool, and the squad can follow them because its remit is national. The episode's structure is a trail followed from branch to branch, with Bulman and Willis in the field and, according to a Network DVD summary of the series, an operation in Oxford to uncover the ring.

The case is complicated by the Foreign Office. Bulman and Willis find that the Foreign Office has an interest in one of the people involved, and the interest is not one the police can simply set aside. Anthony Sharp is billed as Professor Alan Keith and is the likely object of that interest, with Sabina Franklyn and Tracey Childs also named in the cast. This is the episode in which Thorley Walters first appears as William Dugdale, the Foreign Office and Secret Intelligence Service man, and his arrival is the source of the complication: a police fraud investigation now runs alongside an official interest it did not expect.

Dugdale is the episode's lasting addition and the reason it matters in the run. The character assists only when it is in the government's interest for the squad to succeed, and he recurs from Series 3 to Series 5 and crosses into the spin-off Bulman. Introducing him inside a fraud case rather than an espionage story is a more interesting way to bring the character in than a spy plot would have been, and it establishes the theme the later series develop: that the squad's cases can be shaped by interests outside the police, and that help from the intelligence side comes with conditions.

The guest list is strong for its period. Anthony Sharp plays the professor, and Kenny Ireland, Graham Rowe and Johnny Maxfield fill the three bank manager roles that give the fraud its geography. Bruce Bould appears for the second time as DI Tom Casey, and Mark McManus's Lambie runs the case through the squad rather than leaving it to Bulman alone.

The limitation is that the case is spread thin. The billed cast runs to sixteen names for one hour, and no source consulted records how the strands are drawn together, what becomes of the con men or of Professor Keith, or how the Foreign Office interest is settled. What the episode does show is the new national remit tested on a case spanning four cities, and a financial crime rather than a violent one, which puts it nearer the series' con-and-fraud tradition than its gun-and-kidnapping stories. A reviewer of the third series notes that the introduction of the Dugdale character gave the programme more espionage-tinged stories, inserted regularly to make clear these were not ordinary thrillers, and this is where that begins.