Not a Very Civil Civil Servant

Newly built houses on a council estate are crumbling, and the fault line runs all the way up to a building firm called Temple-Blake and a local councillor, Webb, who has been handing out contracts in exchange for favours. The houses were supposed to be someone's fresh start, and they are falling down before the paint has dried. The case against the firm is falling apart too, and not by accident. The nervous accountant is murdered to stop him confessing, and jury members are bullied into returning a verdict of not guilty. Corruption has stopped being a scandal and become a business model.

Cowley takes the collapse of the trial personally, which is never good news for the people responsible. Bodie and Doyle pick up the thread through an undercover fraud officer who posed as a workman to expose the firm's use of sub-standard materials and got beaten for his trouble. From there the operation widens until CI5 is bringing down everyone connected with the mess, from the boardroom down to the councillor's office. It is a slow-burn case, all files and favours, and the show handles it without once reaching for the usual car chase.

Brian Clemens and Edmund Ward wrote it, and Anthony Simmons directed. The cast is a roll-call of familiar British faces: Maurice Denham as Sir James Temple, Bill Fraser as Colonel Summerville, Robert Swann as Logan-Blake, Harold Innocent as Repton, Peter Woodthorpe as Councillor Webb, Tony Church as the minister and Lyndon Brook as Gillam.

The title is the joke and the episode is the argument. This is the series doing white-collar crime, and it turns out the accountants and the councillors can be as dangerous as any terrorist, just slower about it. Cowley's disgust carries the whole thing, and it is worth the wait.