Anything You Can Do

Anything You Can Do is built on a trap, and the trap is the best thing in it. An elderly woman is suffocated in her own home in a manner too deliberately staged to be a robbery gone wrong, and Tony Hill's response is not to search for the killer but to predict that the killer will want to watch. He and Alex Fielding hold a public meeting, on Hill's assurance that the offender will be compelled to attend, and at the meeting Hill's profile identifies one member of the public as the prime suspect: a thuggish security guard named Kelly, who lives with his overbearing mother and has been seen near the scene by several witnesses.

Making a profile public is a genuinely interesting use of Hill's method, and the episode is at its strongest when the meeting is doing the work. The show rarely stages the moment when a psychologist's reading becomes a performance for an audience, and here it does, with all the risk that entails.

Kelly and his mother hold out under questioning, and the first murder turns out to be the opening of a series. The killings show the same signature but different personality traits in the details of their execution, and the differences seem too profound for a single offender. That is the episode's structural problem, because it is close to the premise of Nothing But the Night from two years earlier, and the show does not find a sufficiently different route through it.

What gives the film its own identity is Jonathan Goode. Michael Maloney plays an old friend of Hill's — a psychologist whose work Hill admired when they were students — who turns up out of the blue, and Fielding takes an immediate dislike to him. Her instinct is proved right. The reversal is the point: for once the detective's judgement is better than Hill's, because Hill's affection for his friend blinds him, and the episode is unusual in letting the professional hierarchy of insight run the other way.

That reversal is the strongest thing the fifth series does with the partnership, and it arrives without any commentary. Fielding dislikes a man Hill trusts, she is right, and the show simply lets it stand. Michael Maloney's performance carries it; he plays the warmth convincingly enough that the audience is inclined to side with Hill until it is not.

The episode drew 5.22 million viewers and is rated 8.0 by IMDb users. Two things hold it back. The divided-method puzzle is a repeat, and the conclusion depends on Kelly being cleared in a way that leaves the earlier public meeting feeling like a detour rather than a step. It is a good episode of a series that had by now established exactly what it could do, and the trap at its centre is the clearest demonstration of Hill's method being used deliberately rather than intuitively.