Sweet Smell Of Succession

Joe Castle dies, and with him goes the settled order of one corner of London's underworld. He leaves his ill-gotten gains to a long-lost son, Steven, a man with no criminal connections at all who appears perfectly willing to learn the trade from the wreckage. Regan would rather see the whole outfit dissolve than reorganise, so he warns the assembled minions to keep the peace. They ignore him, naturally. Pat Tarley in particular wants everything for himself and tells Steven so, to his face, with the confidence of a man who thinks the lad is a soft target.

What follows is a slow-motion civil war. The thieves fall out among themselves, grudges surface, and the powder keg everyone saw gets a match applied from an unexpected direction: Steven himself. He turns out to be the most cunning man in the room, playing the warring factions against one another. And every feud he fans is a problem the Flying Squad does not have to solve.

Hywel Bennett is inspired casting as Steven. He brings the innocent face and lets the arithmetic show behind it, and Peter Dyneley's Pat Tarley is the old-school heavy who expects the inheritance by right of loyalty. Sue Lloyd, Willoughby Goddard, Maxwell Shaw, Alan Tilvern and David Sterne fill out the ranks, and Thaw, Waterman and Morgan hold the centre as ever.

Peter Hill and Ian Kennedy Martin wrote it, and William Brayne directs. The episode clearly enjoys its own plot, which is fair enough, because watching crooks do the Sweeney's work for it is a genuine pleasure.

Gangland succession stories usually end in blood. This one ends with the smartest man holding the pot and Regan quietly relieved to have been on the right side of the chaos. The title's sweet smell is a lie, of course. It smells of money, which in this world amounts to much the same thing.