When We Were Very Greedy

There's a joke in the casting of this one, and the show knows it. Spider Scott, lately of Her Majesty's pleasure, is invited onto a committee investigating prison conditions, chaired by a rich merchant banker who has clearly never slept anywhere less comfortable than a first-class sleeper. The reformer's seat is an odd one for a cat burglar, but Spider takes it seriously enough. Then the chairman asks him to resign, and the burglar in him smells a rat worth following. He decides to find out why, using the skills that got him onto the committee in the first place.

And the enquiry room makes a fine playground for him. Committees run on paper and precedence, and Spider is used to reading a room from the wrong side of the door. Whatever the chairman and his colleagues are hiding, it smells better than the cell he left behind. Meanwhile Bulman keeps circling, and Don Henderson plays the detective's growing obsession with nicking Spider as a man slowly losing an argument with himself. Willis comes along for the ride.

Kenneth Royce and Murray Smith wrote it, and Carol Wiles takes the director's chair, the first new hand behind the camera since the series began. Stephen Yardley heads the cast, with Vivienne McKee's Maggie and Mark Dignam's Fairfax in the mix. Ronald Lewis plays Peter Thresher, Barry Andrews Edwin Brooks, Glyn Houston Tom Moody, Derrick O'Connor Knocker Roberts and Brian Oulton Quilter, and the whole board carries the unshakable air of men who have never once been asked a difficult question.

It aired on 25th July 1977, and it's the series at its most playful: a burglar investigating the prison system from a committee seat the establishment is desperate to pull out from under him. That's the appeal of Spider in one image. He keeps getting let into places on the strength of being the one man there who's actually seen the inside.