Cash & Carry

The first Thief Takers opens on a properly unglamorous crime. The target is money most crime dramas would sniff at: the cash sitting behind a high street grocer's tills, counted up at closing. DI Micky Daws and his Flying Squad team set out to trap a gang who have made a specialism of robbing supermarket takings, and the whole thing plays more like a chess problem than a shoot-out.

It starts easy, which is the first warning sign. An informant hands the police their information on a plate, and for a while the crooks look predictable and half-caught already. Then they change their plans. The squad is left with no one to wrestle to the ground, only a set of awkward explanations for what went wrong, which is the more interesting kind of trouble. These robbers think. That lifts the episode above the usual smash-and-grab. There is real pleasure in watching clever coppers meet clever thieves and come off second best.

Roy Mitchell wrote it and Colin Gregg directed, and the casting is where a lot of the pleasure sits. Robert Reynolds plays Daws. Brendan Coyle turns up as DS Bob Tate, Sophie Dix as DC Angela Prudhoe and Lennie James as DC Alan Oxford, all fairly early in careers that went on to bigger rooms. Beatie Edney plays Cathy Worsley. On the wrong side of the law you get Paul Kynman's Leo Davies, Eddie O'Connell's Ronnie Slater, Fred Pearson as John McNally and Niall Refoy as Alec Brady.

As an opener it does the sensible thing. It sets a rhythm rather than a spectacle: a threat that looks manageable, then quietly refuses to behave. Reynolds gives Daws a worn, unshowy steadiness, the sort of copper who trusts the plan right up to the point it stops working. First aired on 1 February 1995. There are flashier debuts around. But few trust a small, grubby premise this much and get away with it.