Supersnout

A good informant is gold, and a bad one is a knife in the back, and "Supersnout" is about telling the difference too late. Regan's man Joey Stickley is greedy but generally reliable, and his tip about a hijack, a lorryload of cigarettes with Stickley himself on lookout, sounds solid enough. The tip is about as Sweeney a crime as exists, the kind of job that has been done on this show a dozen times. So the squad sets up, Carter goes undercover as a driver, and the plan starts to roll.

But the details start not to fit. The intended target turns out to be a jeweller's shop, and the man on the job isn't Stickley at all. He has been replaced by another informant, one who fed the wrong information on purpose, to settle an old score with Det. Chief Insp. Stephen Quirk. Haskins is away in Toronto, so it is Quirk running the show, a man obsessed with catching the Post Office Gang, and the deception lands squarely on his operation. The whole thing fails, and the squad is left frustrated and exposed.

There is a particular pleasure in watching the show admit that sometimes it loses. Most episodes end with the good guys winning and the cars driving off. This one ends with egg on faces and a genuine sense of a job gone wrong. Bill Maynard plays Quirk with the right aggrieved stubbornness, John Tordoff's Stickley is properly weaselly, and the supporting cast, Vernon Dobtcheff, Carl Duering, Rosemarie Dunham, Christopher Coll and George Silver, adds the usual colour, with the jeweller's shop giving the finale a proper set.

Ranald Graham and Ian Kennedy Martin wrote it, Tom Clegg directed. It is a study in professional frustration, and a reminder that in this world even your own sources can be turned against you. Stickley is greedy, but he is honest. The one you cannot trust is the one with a grudge.