Clowns Don't Cry

The episode opens with an informant being beaten. Alan Ford plays Johnny James, whose beating is the incident the whole case grows from, and the trail leads from a pub quarrel into something a great deal larger. The squad's exposure inquiry turns into a counter-espionage job, and the destination is a circus that appears to be sited near British early warning stations, which is the series using a low-level crime as the doorway into an intelligence story.

The episode begins with Bulman in a position he has not been in before. He is already under investigation by A10 for manslaughter arising from the previous episode's racing case, and he is using the exposure inquiry as cover for a case Lambie has told him plainly belongs to Special Branch or MI5. That clash between his conduct and his professional role is the episode's engine, and it is a more complicated picture of policing than a straightforward procedural would give: the squad's national remit does not automatically give it jurisdiction over an intelligence matter, so the work is done by misdirection inside its own organisation.

Dugdale's function is established more fully here than in his introduction. He is the person Bulman goes to for a lead, and the lead points at a foreign intelligence interest. The character had first appeared two episodes earlier and here his place in the series is clear: he opens doors into intelligence territory and does so on the government's terms. Yuri Borienko and Z.R. Sieciechowicz play the Polish side of the case, and the series' own account places the near diplomatic incident with Poland as the consequence of Bulman's exchange with diplomats in a pub.

The treatment of institutions is the episode's strongest theme, and the jurisdictional conflict is the clearest version of it the series had yet staged. Lambie's objection that espionage belongs to Special Branch or MI5 is the institutional reality of who handles what, and Bulman's answer is to run the case anyway under cover of an inquiry he is already subject to. The near diplomatic incident is played as a case of Bulman causing an international problem by doing his job in his own way, which keeps the series' dry humour inside a Cold War story rather than alongside it.

The production is a location piece on the grander end of the series' range. The episode has a way of looking like a bigger-budget production than it was, and the circus setting and the Welsh positions near early warning stations give it an unusual spread of locations for a one-hour drama. A Network DVD reviewer singles out as a good comic turn the helmeted, lurex-caped flasher who appears in the circus material, and names this episode, with the horse-racing one, among the third series' weak spots on the grounds that circus and racetrack locations invite padding with stock footage.

The conclusion of the espionage strand is not recorded in any source consulted, and the fate of the Polish diplomats and of the circus strand is not stated. What is established is that the episode takes the programme properly into espionage and that it is one of three consecutive episodes at the back of Series 3 moving it towards the political and international stories the later series rely on. A wiki lead also lists Robert Glenister among the guests; he does not appear in the episode's own credit block and the name is recorded as uncorroborated rather than as a credit.