Wheels Within Wheels

Jack Longman is good with figures, and a stolen Mercedes and a ledger send Ho towards a result, though not the one he was expecting. The third episode of the second series is the run's most explicitly financial case and its clearest example of the show doing money crime without violence.

George Sewell plays Longman, and Rosemary Martin plays Greta Longman; Rudolph Walker plays Terence Villiers and Brian Coburn Smith, with Philip Dunbar as Mr Elderton and Keith James as Pete. IMDb adds Richard Rees as Dr David Li, Kate West as Elizabeth and Larrington Walker as Ezra, none of whom appears in Wikipedia's list. The title, a proverb about hidden mechanisms, describes a plot in which a theft is the way into something else, and the summary's phrase about a result he did not have in mind is the only hint any source gives about where the case goes.

The episode has the run's best-known records problem attached to it. The BBC's own billing, Wikipedia and TVDB all give the title as Wheels Within Wheels; IMDb's database carries it as Wheels Between Wheels, and has done for forty years. Because the broadcaster's form governs, the site uses Wheels Within Wheels and the disagreement is recorded rather than smoothed over. For anyone using IMDb as a reference for this series, it is the one title that will not match.

David Green directed his only episode of the run here. He was a British television director who worked steadily through the period, and the subject gives the episode a different flavour from the surrounding weeks: offices and cars rather than the dockside and the street. It is the second series' counterpart to Income Tax, the 1981 episode about a retired criminal and the Revenue, and it shows how far the format was prepared to travel from Limehouse while keeping Ho at the centre.

Ian Kennedy Martin wrote the episode, as he wrote all four of the second series' first month and six of its eight overall. Edward Boyd's two scripts arrive in October. Terence Williams produced, Harry South's music and Peter Chapman's photography are as they always are, and Bill Wright edited.

The episode's method is paper and vehicles. A stolen Mercedes and a ledger are the instruments, and the legwork is done in offices rather than through informants, which makes it the run's least typical hour in terms of procedure and one of its four best-rated.

IMDb records 7.8 from 5 votes, joint fourth of the fourteen, which is a figure worth recording and not worth relying on. No contemporary review and no audience figure exist; the series' viewers column is empty for every episode.

What the record cannot supply is the result Ho does not expect. No source says what the ledger shows or how the case closes, and none of it is invented here. What survives is a 1982 hour about a man who is good with numbers, a car that was stolen, and a set of books nobody has written up since.