Tom Thumb and Other Stories

Bulman goes under cover among the tramp population of Liverpool's dockland. The disguise is the engine of the episode. He is working to reach the drug smugglers known as Tom Thumb, who operate through the docks, and to turn a smuggler against his Irish terrorist bosses. The episode's own summary is simpler: he goes under cover to break a Liverpool-based drug-smuggling ring, and the organisation behind it will stop at nothing to protect its interests with a fortune at stake.

The billed cast sets out the people inside the operation. Walter McMonagle plays Tom Thumb, John Horsley the Professor, and John O'Toole, Robert Oates, James Coyle and David Webb play the men around the ring. Jim Norton appears as Cathal Slattery, which gives the story an Irish name alongside the criminal ones. The named figures sit on more than one side of the smuggling operation, which is what makes the case what the listings call a crossfire of factions within the gang: the people Bulman is moving among are not a single organisation working together, and the danger to him comes as much from the ring's own divisions as from the police's pursuit of it.

That factional split is what makes the tramp disguise workable as a method. Bulman can sit close to men who would not talk to a police officer, and the case grows out of what the ring is doing to itself. His usual covers have a job attached to them; here he adopts a way of living, which is the furthest the series takes its founding idea that its officers go among people the police cannot reach in their own persons. It is a disguise piece for Don Henderson before it is anything else, and it places him in heavy makeup and costume for much of the hour.

The Liverpool dockland setting is the episode's distinctive production feature and gives the story a working-class setting that differs from the London and Home Counties material of most of the series. The ring's connection to Irish terrorist interests gives the case a political dimension the Manchester episodes did not have, and it is the deepest disguise episode of the run.

The critical limitation is that the sources give the episode a clear setup and almost no content. The cast is large and no published account says how the strands are drawn together, what becomes of Tom Thumb and the Professor, or how the terrorist connection is dealt with. The ending is not stated in any listing consulted and is not asserted here. One production detail is worth recording for its own sake: Walter McMonagle, who plays Tom Thumb, had appeared in Series 2 as Finbar McQuade in The Wheeler Dealers, and the casting of the same actor in a different guest role is a documented production habit rather than a coincidence to explain. Along with the two episodes either side of it, this is one of three at the back of Series 3 that push the programme beyond ordinary crime.