Hartley's Midnight Cowboy

The fiercest fights rarely come from grand criminal schemes. They come from neighbours, and Hartley's Midnight Cowboy is built entirely on the escalating conflict between two farmers over what is properly theirs. It went out in November 1982, late in the third series, and it remains one of the show's purest arguments that keeping the peace between neighbours is police work every bit as demanding as any arrest.

The dispute, whatever started it, has grown past the point where the men involved can settle it, and the police are called in to keep the peace between people who have stopped listening to each other. Inspector Jean Darblay takes charge, with Sergeant Joseph Beck and Sergeant George Parrish beside her, Detective Chief Inspector Jim Logan lending rank and PC Martin Helmshore doing the legwork across the farmsteads. The principals of the feud, Graham Hastings, Bill Sullivan and his wife Kate, and Ted Margetts, all have their version of the wrong done to them, and Detective Sergeant Bloom adds the CID's perspective. The episode's work is the unglamorous business of untangling a knot of grievances, one gate and one boundary line at a time.

Bill Lyons wrote it, Diarmuid Lawrence directed. Stephanie Turner is Jean Darblay, with David Ellison as Beck, Noel Collins as Parrish, Tony Caunter as Logan and David Straun as Helmshore. Ivan Beavis plays Graham Hastings, Philip Barnes is Detective Sergeant Bloom, Al Ashton is Bill Sullivan, Heather Tobias is Kate Sullivan and Nigel Humphreys is Ted Margetts.

The title winks at Midnight Cowboy, but there is nothing glamorous about this patch of England. The drama is in the mud and the machinery and the way a small slight can be nursed into a war over the course of a bad harvest season.

The episode makes a full hour out of a community dispute with no criminal element in sight, and it earns the runtime. Sometimes restoring peace to the land is harder than catching a thief.