Because of ‘wine week’ aka Passover and other calls on my time such as child and chickens I didn’t manage to get published the weekend movie feature that I was going to put up on the last two consecutive Fridays. Anyway, here’s the woefully delayed weekend movie which is a great crime story from 1963 called ‘Calculated Risk’ about an old and very unsuccessful criminal being released from prison and contemplating ‘one last big job’ about which he saw himself as the ‘brains’ behind it. Other criminals think of the released man as a ‘Johah’, someone who will bring bad luck to the team. They put aside their worries about this big job, which is to raid the vaults of a bank holding wages for many of the local businesses in the area and put the plan into action. However this plan runs into snags that they didn’t foresee and which will change their lives forever.

As there’s been a bit of a delay in me attending to the Weekend Movie feature, in some recompense for my somewhat unavoidable tardiness, here is something extra. It’s an early episode of the BBC crime drama Softly Softly – Task Force and which was itself an offshoot of another popular BBC police procedural Z Cars. Like many other episodes of Softly Softly and Z Cars what is noticeable about this programme is its excellent writing. It manages to introduce and keep going several different plotlines including a missing child, a new broom of a specialist police officer arriving at a new police station, police incompetence, the affect of misplaced allegations and the, for then, novel experience of the introduction of women in the detective role. What’s good about this episode from 1969 is that it keeps all these separate but linked plotlines going and keeps the viewers attention on them but combines them all in a really good but tragic denouement. It’s well worth a watch to see good workmanlike writing that does what it supposed to and also to see just how much the BBC has declined in quality since then.