Songbird

The corruption inquiry closes, and the officer who helped Stafford see it through is given the prize. Alan Cade gets the job. Eastland's new chief constable is the man who charmed Rosalind Maxwell, Chair of the Police Authority, while Anne Stewart, the other contender, spent the whole race failing to make the right impression. The promotion was never really a competition, and the hour lets that become clear gradually. The handover is conducted with the usual county politeness, which only makes it sharper.

The episode is a quiet study in how promotions actually happen. Cade is debonair and easy in the room, and Maxwell is charmed by him. Anne is competent and busy, and it is not enough. Her competence is not the issue; she is simply not the one people warm to, and the episode says so without cruelty. Nobody says the word unfair, but the hour knows it is there. The committee rooms do the deciding, and the corridors do the whispering.

Peter Jukes and Jeffrey Caine wrote it, A.J. Quinn directed. Tim Pigott-Smith's Stafford hands over the inquiry with Martin Shaw's Cade moving into the light beside him, while Karen Archer's Anne watches her chances narrow through a series of small, polite defeats. Kate Binchy's Rosalind Maxwell is the quiet centre of the whole business, with Michael Cochrane's Nigel Crimmond, Jeremy Clyde's Sir Anthony Maylor, T.P. McKenna's Colin Fowler, Judy Loe's Dr Elizabeth Stafford, Eamon Boland's Jim Gray and Stuart McGugan's Sean McCloud filling out the force.

It is not a dramatic hour, and it is better for it. The show trusts that watching a career come apart in meetings is as tense as any raid. It is a quiet farewell to the Stafford era, wrapped in committee minutes and polite smiles. Farewells in this show rarely come with trumpets, and this one is no exception. But the songbird in the title gets the tune, and somebody else gets the branch.