Coming Back

Mick Grainger has spent six years inside, and now the door is open. Coming Back is about the walk through it, the hardest walk a man like him will ever take, back to his wife Judy and a life that has carried on without him. Ron Bain plays Mick with his nerves on the surface, and Rachel Davies' Judy has had six years to get used to the quiet. Six years is a long time in any marriage, and the script does not pretend the couple can simply pick up where the sentence interrupted them.

The police are mostly in the margins here, keeping an eye on the return because that is part of the job nobody talks about. Inspector Jean Darblay and her officers watch the homecoming from a distance, and the station's steady rhythms frame the story: Sergeant Joseph Beck, Sergeant George Parrish, PC Roland Bentley, and a young Kevin Whately as PC Chris Evans, years before Morse made him a household name. Mr. Lawrenson and a woman called Adele complete the circle around the Graingers.

Tony Parker wrote it and Carol Wilks directed. Stephanie Turner is Jean Darblay, David Hargreaves is Tom, David Ellison, Noel Collins and Mark Drewry make up the regulars, and Bernard Gallagher appears as Mr. Lawrenson with Leigh Conroy as Adele. The episode went out on 11 October 1980, when the first season was still working out how much room a quiet story like this could take inside a crime series.

The episode is a quiet study of how long absence reshapes a man and the home he left behind. There is no social worker hovering and no counselling on offer; a man comes home to the estate and the neighbours' curtains twitch. Leaving the prison is the easy part. Walking into the front room is the thing.

The show was at its best when it remembered that the most frightening door a man can face is his own.