Out of the Game

A youth is shot and killed by armed police on an estate where the resentment has been building for years, and the community's patience finally runs out. The rest of the episode is the aftermath: DS Tony Clark running the investigation while the press fans the flames, and the enquiry quietly sabotaged from inside, by his own boss no less. Chief Supt. John Deakin keeps getting in the way of the man he sent to Mulberry Street, and the friction between them is one of the episode's quiet pleasures.

But the focus belongs to Pete Postlethwaite as Ch. Supt. Jameson, the senior officer whose force fired the shots. Postlethwaite could make a bus timetable sound like a verdict, and he gives Jameson a weight the script barely needs to ask for. The man has to answer for his men's actions, and you can see him carrying the cost of it before he says a word.

Russell Lewis wrote it, Alan Dossor directed, Peter Norris produced. Around the edges are the faces that make early-nineties British telly feel like a reunion in the making: a young Marc Warren, years before Hustle, as P.C. Underwood, and Jamie Foreman as P.C. Roper. Tom Georgeson's Harry Naylor and Siobhan Redmond's Maureen Connell are on hand, and Bill Leadbitter's Insp. Tom Reith keeps the station side of things moving.

The episode works because it doesn't pretend there's a clean answer. The youth was apparently armed, the force was under pressure, the community was already angry. Everyone's a bit right and everyone's a bit wrong, which is probably why the enquiry keeps stalling. It's a story about a shooting that's really about the trouble of investigating your own side. The enquiry grinds on, the press pack howls, and the estate waits to see which way it falls. Nobody leaves this one satisfied, least of all the people who have to live with the outcome.