Home-Grown Or Imported?

Violence erupts in Hartley when a newcomer tries to open a country club, and suddenly the town has a row on its hands big enough to need the police. Home-Grown Or Imported? asks its question in the title and lets the community answer it with broken windows and hard feelings.

The dispute is the familiar one: what is established against what is brought in. The incomer's club is meant to be progress, but to the people who have lived in the town all their lives it is an invasion with a bar attached. Inspector Jean Darblay has to keep the peace while everybody takes sides, and she gets help from both directions: the local ranks of Sergeant Joseph Beck, Sergeant George Parrish and PC Roland Bentley, and a Metropolitan Police presence in Detective Inspector Winder and Detective Sergeant Fournel, who arrive with the case's more serious implications. Detective Chief Inspector Jim Logan and Detective Sergeant Dave Melchett fill out the investigation, and Allan Surtees' Greenwood hovers somewhere in the middle of it all.

Simon Masters wrote it, Pennant Roberts directed. Stephanie Turner is Jean Darblay, with David Hargreaves as Tom, David Ellison as Beck, Noel Collins as Parrish, Mark Drewry as Bentley, Tony Caunter as Logan and Geoffrey Larder as Melchett. John Judd plays Detective Inspector Winder, Eric Richard plays Detective Sergeant Fournel and Allan Surtees plays Greenwood.

The episode knows that small-town resentment can burn as hot as any big-city feud, and it treats the club's opening as the provocation it clearly is to the people who live around it. The show's fondness for working-class settings gets a proper workout here, with the argument about the club standing in for every argument about who gets to decide what a town becomes.

It is a story about change arriving with a brass band and finding nobody dancing. The police just have to keep the tune from turning into a riot.