Widows: Episode 1

Funerals suit Harry Rawlins. His own opens the series, because the robbery that killed him took three men at once. One job gone wrong, an explosion, and Dolly Rawlins is suddenly a widow with bills, a cousin with keys, and the certain knowledge of what her husband actually did at work. Linda Perelli and Shirley Miller are in the same boat; their husbands died in the same blast.

Eddie Rawlins, Harry's cousin, hands Dolly the keys at the funeral. They open a deposit box at the bank, and inside sit Harry's ledgers, a gun and money. The ledgers are the prize. Harry wrote everything down, every robbery carried out and every one planned, and two sets of people want them: the police and the Fisher brothers, who have their own reasons for wanting them. Dolly lifts the box while the police follow her around town, gives them the slip twice, and puts the question to Linda and Shirley. Their answer is to run the next job themselves.

The episode ends on a neat little twist. Dolly gets home expecting a quiet night and finds the house turned over, someone waiting in the living room. All episode she has been the one giving pursuers the slip. But now somebody is a step ahead of her, and she doesn't know who.

Lynda La Plante wrote it, Ian Toynton directed. Ann Mitchell anchors the whole thing as Dolly, with Maureen O'Farrell and Fiona Hendley as Linda and Shirley. The men's world around them is well stocked: David Calder's D.I. Resnick, Paul Jesson and Peter Machin as his team, Dudley Sutton's Boxer Davis, Stanley Meadows as Eddie, Kate Williams as Audrey Withey and Jeffrey Chiswick as Arnie Fisher.

What earns this opening episode its place is the refusal to pretend the women fancy a life of crime. They are grieving and broke, and furious about both. The robbery is pure arithmetic, and grief is doing the sums. That is why you stay for the next one.