Trouble At T'Mill

The trouble at the mill is a steam engine. Old, wheezing, precious to the people who remember it in steam, and now the cause of a dispute serious enough to bring Inspector Jean Darblay out in person. Somebody at the mill has called the police, and the call tells you how far the falling-out has gone. Machinery this age carries feelings with it, and the episode knows exactly what it is doing by putting the machine at the centre of the frame.

Who owns the engine, who has a claim on it, who wants it sold for scrap and who wants it kept running: the argument has spread through the community, and the officers are there to keep the peace while everyone has their say. Detective Chief Inspector Jim Logan lends weight, Sergeant Joseph Beck and PC Roland Bentley do the standing about, and Detective Constable Ron Davies runs the errands. The names attached to the dispute give it its texture: Israel Smethurst, Ted and Vera Galway, Walter Hancock, Tony Woodward.

Brian Finch wrote it, Derek Lister directed. Stephanie Turner is Jean Darblay, with Tony Caunter as Logan, David Ellison as Beck, Mark Drewry as Bentley and Anthony Milner as Davies. John Barrett plays Israel Smethurst, Alan Lake and Christine Hargreaves are Ted and Vera Galway, Antony Carrick is Walter Hancock and Christopher Good is Tony Woodward.

It is a gentle hour in a series that would later find darker material, in the best sense: nobody dies, nobody goes to prison, and the worst thing on offer is a grudge about scrap value. There is something quietly lovely about a full episode built on a machine most of the country had stopped thinking about. The engine is both the argument and the backdrop, a working-class artefact treated on screen with more respect than it ever received in its working life.

The dispute gets sorted, more or less, because these things usually do. The pleasure was in watching a community argue about its own history.