Golden Boy

The title gives it away a little. "Golden Boy" is about gold, and the interesting thing is how it travels. Max Deller, played with relish by Dudley Sutton, leads a gang that needs to shift a load of stolen gold out of the country, and his answer is a nasty piece of coercion. An old cell mate, Bernie Conway, has gone straight under a new name and built a successful sporting equipment company. Deller leans on him, the gold goes out disguised as exercise weights, and a man who thought he was out of the life finds himself back in it. It is a mean little scheme, the sort that only works because somebody has a past, and the episode understands exactly how mean it is.

But the other strand is smaller and, in its way, more fun. Regan spots the seedy informant Harry Fuller in a pub, flush with money he has no honest explanation for. What follows is classic Regan, a chat in a corner that starts friendly and ends with Harry's nerve gone. Anthony Morton plays him nicely, all sweat and bluster, and it is the closest the episode comes to a laugh.

Martin Hall and Ian Kennedy Martin wrote the script, Tom Clegg directed. The cast is typically strong. John Nolan gives Bernie Conway a quiet decency that makes his situation feel properly uncomfortable, Colin Campbell is Det. Insp. Terry Potter, and Tony Jay, Ann Zelda and Peter Miles fill in the rest. Carter and Haskins do their usual dependable work around the edges, and there is a nice line in quiet menace running under the ordinary offices and warehouses of Conway's respectable world.

It is a solid hour of early Sweeney, the sort where a straightforward idea, smuggle the gold, gets dressed up with enough deception and hard feeling to keep you watching. The show would go on to bigger and stranger stories, but it always kept a soft spot for the plain ones done well.