Everybody Does It

Everybody Does It is one of those episodes where the trouble starts on a shopping trip. Arlette finds a bargain she cannot quite resist, the sort that is cheap because it ought not to be for sale at all. Her poor judgement pulls her husband straight into a crime syndicate's business, and suddenly Van der Valk is up to his neck in someone else's mess.

The fun of it is the scale of the fall. A small act of greed or weakness, harmless in the moment, draws the wrong attention and then will not let go. The episode follows the ripple from that one purchase out into serious criminal company operating close to home. Van der Valk spends the hour paying for a decision he never made, which is its own quiet joke. It is a neat demonstration of how a private lapse becomes a public danger.

Barry Foster is Van der Valk, with Joanna Dunham as Arlette and Nigel Stock as Samson. John Standing plays Ehrlich and Suzy Kendall is Marijka. Maurice Colbourne is Nick Scholtz. James Aubrey plays Jan and Leon Lissek is Frans. Darlene Johnson is Christina and Pam St. Clement plays Ada. Philip Broadley and Nicolas Freeling wrote it; Ben Bolt directed.

What makes the hour work is the way it puts Arlette at the centre of the trouble rather than at its edge. She is not a hostage or a bystander here but the cause of it, and Dunham plays the comic unease of a woman who knows she has made a foolish choice. That is a different shade for the series, and a welcome one.

And it is pleasing to watch Foster's Van der Valk clear up a mess he had no hand in making. The syndicate turns out less invincible than it looks, which is the point: a dubious bargain is only as dangerous as the people who sold it.