Caught

With Gina dead, the second episode of Band of Gold becomes a hunt, but not the kind ITV audiences were used to. The police are investigating, yet the women of the Lane have little reason to trust them, and the story keeps its focus on the friends Gina left behind as suspicion moves from one man to another.

Carol takes the lead. Guilty about having brought Gina into the work, and frightened that the killer is still out there, she decides to trap the man she believes is responsible. The plan needs back-up, and the episode is as much about whether the women will stand together as about whether Carol is right. Her own position is compromised. DCI Newall, who is running the murder inquiry, has an arrangement with her: she tolerates his attentions, and he does not arrest her. He is not quite a villain, but he is entirely comfortable with the power he holds.

Rose, meanwhile, tries to protect Tracy, the fifteen-year-old whose pimp, Dez, controls her with drugs and violence. Television Heaven called Samantha Morton's performance heartbreaking and raw. The threat from Dez is real; during the series he attacks her and almost kills her.

The episode also introduces Curly, a middle-aged client with a fetish for stockings, whose oddness makes Carol uneasy. He is a natural suspect, which is precisely the point. Steve, Gina's husband, is another. Mellor keeps several men in the frame and lets the audience share the women's uncertainty about whom to fear.

The weakness is that the suspects are rather obviously laid out, one per scene, and the whodunnit mechanics can feel more conventional than the rest of the drama. The strength is the point of view. The murder inquiry is seen from the street, by women who know that they are both the likely victims and the people the police are least inclined to protect.

The drama also arrived in the middle of a real controversy. In the spring of 1995, while the series was on air, a campaign by young local men against street prostitution ran in Manningham, the district on which the Lane is based, and the historian Judith Walkowitz has argued that the series became caught up in local arguments about how the area should be policed.

The audience grew sharply in the second week. Mellor later spoke of 15 million viewers, and bookmakers began taking bets on the identity of the killer, a sign of how quickly the series had caught the public imagination.