24 Hours in Police Custody: A jaw-dropping opening to this Breaking Bad tale of drugs kingpins, patsies and crystal meth

The latest episode of the long-running true crime documentary series opened with what seemed to be a routine police stop of car in a lay-by on a nondescript East Anglian road.

The driver – a pleasantly-spoken, middle-aged man called Toby – also seemed nondescript, worrying about the effect the police officers might have on his heart, having recently recovered from cardiac surgery.

“I've got my Chinese in the car,” he says to the police.

“It's not illegal to have a Chinese in the car.”

“Well, to be honest,” he says sheepishly, “there is some illegal stuff in the car.”

What Toby called “some illegal stuff”, it turned out, was so extravagantly out there it shocked even the long-serving police officers.

The remnants of the Chinese takeaway, but also sex toys, Viagra and “more drugs than Superdrug”, according to one of the officers.

The drugs turned out to be crystal meth – the stuff Heisenberg manufactures in Breaking Bad – which we learned was becoming an increasing problem in the UK.

This country had originally served as a convenient staging post on the drugs' journey from Central America to Australia and the Far East, but more and more the meth is staying here and finding a growing band of users.

“The last thing we need is a growing consumer market,” one officer says, with commendable understatement.

But Toby was just a small link in a bigger chain, as the programme explained, each step proving more and more eye-opening.

From drugs being imported inside gym equipment, to the police delivering the package to the dealers in a “controlled delivery”, to the discovery of 12kg of the stuff in a suburban house – worth more than £1.6m.

As well as the 'kingpin' in the UK, who turned out to be a Mexican tattoo artist called Axel, every crime story has to have a patsy, and 24 Hours in Police Custody is no exception.

Daniel Fordham was a pal of Axel, and after he complained about his struggles to make ends meet for his family, Axel offered him what seemed to be a perfect way out.

All he had to do was 'look after' the drugs and maybe take of video of them for potential clients, and Axel would give him £15,000

Of course, the videos show Daniel's tattoos, which help the police identify him, and by the time he is arrested he still hasn't seen a penny of the promised £15,000.

“This money, thinking it's going to change my life, it's ruined my life,” he sobs in interview.

24 Hours in Police Custody's great strength is in its story-telling, brilliantly edited together from CCTV, police bodyworn video, interviews and a minimal amount of what you might call conventional camerawork.

It allows the central characters themselves to tell the story, revelations and – often – jaw-dropping information coming from their own mouths.

Some of the ways they attempt to explain away irrefutable evidence can even raise an astonished laugh, leavening what could be a grim tale of people brought low by greed, or more often circumstance and incompetence.

It also shines a light on the two strands of justice – rehabilitation and punishment.

One officer says of Toby: “I feel quite sorry for him... he's got himself in a sticky situation... and he knows what he's done will affect the rest of his life.”

“Do you really?” her colleague says, with an almost audible snort. “I don't feel sorry for him. The reason he's upset is because he's been caught and knows he's in trouble.”

All three – Toby, Axel and Daniel – are jailed for their parts in the drug trade, but as a caption at the end makes clear, demand for crystal meth is only growing in the UK.

It's a grubby tale, but told with such brio it only reinforces the notion that truth is definitely stranger than fiction.