Taste Of Fear

Detective Sergeant Robert Hargreaves arrives with a service record you could frame, and Regan takes one look at him and decides the man is not Sweeney material. Nobody else in the squad agrees. The general view is that Regan is running a private vendetta against the new man, which puts the guv'nor in the odd position of being the only one in the room who is right.

The proof arrives at a caravan site. A gang of ex-soldiers wanted for a violent robbery are holed up there, they are armed, and the squad goes in hard. Hargreaves, the decorated soldier, bottles it. He cowers behind a row of oil drums while the shooting starts, and from that moment the episode stops being about competence and starts being about character.

Hargreaves is no cartoon coward. He has a good past and a bad moment, and the general tide of opinion, convinced Regan is hounding him out of spite, keeps him in the job while Regan fumes. Being right costs Regan nothing in the short run and a great deal in the long one, because the squad's goodwill is part of his working capital too. The show is too honest to hand either man an easy win.

Roger Marshall and Ian Kennedy Martin wrote it, and David Wickes directs the raid with real snap. Norman Eshley gives Hargreaves a haunted, upright quality, the look of a man who has been told he is brave for so long that he believed it, and the supporting cast of Arthur English, George Sweeney, Bernard Spear, Lesley Dunlop, Ralph Arliss and Norma Streader fills the pubs and caravans with the usual texture. Thaw, Waterman and Morgan hold the centre.

It is a character piece dressed in a raid's clothes, and the raid is a cracker. But the image that stays is the row of oil drums and the man behind them, and the look on Regan's face afterwards. The Sweeney was never kind to weakness, and this is that cruelty at its most interesting.