Nightmare

It starts with a lorry load of cigars and ends somewhere much darker. Nightmare, from The Sweeney's fourth series, opens with a hijack that goes badly wrong: the driver is killed, one of the robbers too, and before Regan can get a proper hold on the case the surviving gang is wiped out by a second crew altogether.

That second crew is Irish, led by Michael Farrell and Sean Flynn, and their interest in the cigars is nothing to do with smoking. Some of the boxes are full of drugs, stock meant for the I.R.A., who plan to swap it for a new model of firearm fitted with laser sights. Regan picks his way in through the humblest of doors, following the sale of the stolen cigars, and the trail ends at a house in the country where the Irishmen are sitting tight and waiting for a plane to arrive with what they're owed.

Running underneath all of this is the thing that gives the episode its title. Jane, Regan's girlfriend, keeps having bad dreams about harm coming to him. It sounds like a small device, but the week gives her plenty of reason to worry, and by the end she's looking close to proved right. Lea Brodie plays her opposite John Thaw, and there's a nice tension in watching Regan, of all people, be the one somebody lies awake about.

Ranald Graham and Ian Kennedy Martin wrote it and David Wickes directed, with Dennis Waterman as Carter, Garfield Morgan as Haskins, Paul Antrim as Farrell, Tony Rohr as Flynn, Barry Philips as Keith Wilson, David Gillies as Norman Charles, Kenneth Watson as Horrocks and John Alkin as DS Tom Daniels.

The plot is busier than the series usually bothered with, guns and drugs and an aerial drop, but it holds together because the trail Regan follows is so pleasingly unglamorous. Cigars sold for cash. Somebody talked. They usually did.