Shot Gun

Jean Darblay has barely arrived at Hartley police station before the call comes in. A man has taken his daughter from her home at gunpoint, and the job of talking him down lands with the new inspector. So does the other job, the one nobody wrote into the job description: persuading a station full of men who did not ask for her that she belongs in the big office.

The episode runs both crises at once. Rodney Maskell is not a professional criminal but a father coming apart, and the family around him, Madge and their daughter Maureen, are caught in the blast of it. There is no SWAT team to call; the tools available are a steady manner and a working telephone. Darblay has to keep her voice level while the uniforms around her wait for her to make a mistake. Superintendent Lake watches from upstairs. Even her own sergeant, Joseph Beck, is no fan of the new arrangement.

Ian Kennedy Martin wrote it, David Reynolds directed. Stephanie Turner plays Jean Darblay, with David Hargreaves as her husband Tom, David Ellison as Sergeant Beck, Noel Collins as Sergeant George Parrish, Mark Drewry as PC Roland Bentley and Geoffrey Larder as Detective Sergeant Dave Melchett. John Ringham's Superintendent Lake hovers. The Maskell family are Tony Melody, Margaret Stallard and a very young Joanne Whalley as Maureen.

Whalley would go on to far bigger things, but here she is simply a girl caught in the middle of her father's worst day, and she holds her own without any fuss. And there is real period pleasure in watching a 1980 police station cope with a woman in charge, the suspicion practically coming off the wallpaper. The hostage business is handled with proper tension, the old-fashioned kind, before helicopters and earpieces took over.

Not a gentle introduction, then. But it told you exactly where the series stood, and which side it was on.