Big Spender

The Smith Brothers have been a pain in the Flying Squad's side for years. Charley, John and Barry, a family firm specialising in violence, always slippery enough to keep their hands clean when the Sweeney comes knocking. Robberies and hijacks, the lot of them, and never a fingerprint in reach. But this time Regan and Carter go after them properly, and the twist is that the brothers have gone soft. They have moved into the parking ticket business.

The scheme is almost charming in its smallness. The manager of a busy central London car park has been defrauding his own firm with fake tickets, and the Smiths, having sniffed the money, decide to take a cut of his greed. That is the whole case: strong-arm men reduced to squeezing a car park for a few quid a day. The episode gets real mileage out of the absurdity. It doesn't take the Sweeney long to move in, and the corner happens inside the car park itself, which feels right somehow.

Allan Prior and Ian Kennedy Martin wrote it, and Viktors Ritelis directed. The cast is a treat. Warren Mitchell turns up as William Wardle and quietly walks off with his scenes, Catherine Schell is Stella Goodman, and Godfrey James, Julian Holloway and Billy Hamon make a suitably nasty family of brothers. Peter Armitage's Jacko and Maureen Pryor's Enid Wardle round things out, with Haskins hovering as ever.

It is the kind of episode that proves the show could do low-key as well as loud. The cleverest schemes need less muscle and more careful accounting, and the Sweeney could always read a ledger as well as a shotgun. Some of the best episodes of the series are the ones where the villains get clever and it still doesn't help them, and the whole thing is a reminder that the Sweeney chased the money as well as the guns.