Stand and Deliver

Two young men hold up a coach carrying tourists on a countryside route, take the passengers' property and get away on horseback. The method is the point. The robbers have gone back to mounted robbery on the open road, which is both a genuine criminal tactic and a joke about the country's mythologies, and the coach being a tourist vehicle makes the victims visitors rather than locals and raises the case's profile. The robberies are a series rather than a single incident, which is why the squad is called in: the local force is dealing with a pattern of armed robberies on rural routes by men on horseback.

The investigating weight falls on Willis, assisted by Bennett, and the division of labour is deliberate. Bulman has personal matters to attend to and is kept off the main line of the enquiry for much of the episode, so the case is Willis's to run, with Bennett working it as the officer who brings method to it. That is the same description the series accounts give her character generally, the disciplined counterpart to Bulman's intuition, and here she is paired against Willis, the physical and instinctive half of the usual partnership. The episode's joke about a distinctive method being the thing to identify is carried by the robbers themselves, whose approach is recognisable enough to be located.

The coach passengers anchor the investigation. Joan Hickson appears among them as Miss Robinson, the type of British tourist who will not be intimidated and the person the robbers underestimate. Four named young men are cast as the robbers, played as young men rather than hardened criminals, which is what the tone requires, and the casting of recognisable young actors of the period is part of the episode's lightness.

The character development here is Bulman's absence rather than his presence. A promoted DCI who works every other case in the series steps back for one week, and the episode demonstrates that the squad functions without him, which is both a small statement about the unit and a way of giving the two junior regulars a week of their own. It is a test of the unit rather than of the man, and the episode is not harmed by running largely without Henderson. Nothing changes a regular permanently; it is a standalone week in the season's pattern.

This is the season's comedy. The return of the highwayman to the English countryside, carried out by young men on horseback against coach parties, is played as a caper rather than a threat, and the countryside, the tourists and the mounted robberies give the episode a tone the London and Glasgow stories do not have. The investigation is procedurally thin by the series' standards and works because of the pairing of the two officers rather than because of the puzzle. The reference account's verdict, that it is not one of the better episodes but is very pleasant viewing, is a fair summary, and its judgement that a series of mounted robberies against coach parties does not sustain a fifty-minute investigation without filler is supported by the material. Its value in the run is as a change of key between two harder stories.

The director credit is disputed. IMDb and Wikipedia's table give Bill Gilmour; TheTVDB credits Tristan DeVere Cole and attributes two episodes to him at dates matching this record. The disagreement is recorded and not resolved.