Written by John Milne, Directed by Richard Holthouse

Carver, Stamp and Quinnan are en route to arrest Daniel King (a builder accused of GBH). But they never get there, as they spot an early morning robbery taking place at a post office. Carver and Stamp give chase on foot but it doesn’t end well – Carver is confronted by a pair of shotgun-wielding thugs who ask him if he’s “feeling brave?”

As they run away, Carver is left more than a little shaken and stirred and he doesn’t lose this feeling for some time. It’s most pronounced when he later confronts the manager of the post office – Keith Yale (Tony Salaman) – who was clearly in cahoots with the robbers. Carver doesn’t actually lay a finger on him, but yelling at Yale seems to give him a cathartic release. “Your mates almost blew my spine away this morning, even before I’d had breakfast”.

Another post office worker – Mr Costas (Dimitri Andreas) – is also in the frame for a while. Andreas is a familiar television face (he’d shortly become a semi-regular in London’s Burning). Also more than familiar is Shirin Taylor as Mrs Costas. She was just a matter of weeks away from beginning her stint on Coronation Street but had already clocked up appearances in multiple series over the last decade or so.

Taylor had been eaten by a rock in the Doctor Who story The Stones of Blood, for example. She also made multiple appearances in the forgotten Carla Lane sitcom I Woke Up One Morning, which really deserves to be a little better known than it is. Maybe one day it’ll receive the BBC4 repeat treatment.

Eventually the robbers are rounded up and Jim is provided with closure (unsurprisingly he asks them if they’re “feeling brave” as he lays into them). This is a neat, if obvious, way to close out the episode. One point that strikes me when rewatching this one is that I can’t decide whether Stamp and Carver were brave or foolhardy to give chase. Surely the possibility that the robbers were armed would have crossed their minds? So if you’ve got nothing more than a truncheon in your hand, perhaps it would have been better to wait for backup.

Elsewhere, the B plot of Daniel King is put into the (capable?) hands of Hollis and Garfield. Unfortunately, although Hollis is at the front and Garfield is at the back of the house, they don’t spot King sneaking out a window in the side of the house until it’s too late!

D.S. Roach: What happened to that GBH that Carver was sent out to nick? Did Hollis and Garfield go over there?
Sgt. Cryer: They missed him, he jumped through a window.
D.S. Roach: Oh dear, I thought Hollis only had that effect on women.