Misunderstandings

Two women struggle with loneliness, and for one of them the consequences are tragic. Misunderstandings is a delicate study in isolation, the kind of episode that uses the structure of an investigation to look at something much more human, and it does not flinch from where the story goes. It went out in November 1982, near the close of the third series, and it trusts its audience to sit with an unhappy ending rather than a tidy one. That confidence is what makes the episode stick.

The two women at the centre, Lin Mitchell and Beryl Ashton, are the sort of people a community sees every day and never really sees at all. Their loneliness curdles into something darker over the course of the hour, and the police are left to pick through the wreckage of it. Inspector Jean Darblay runs the inquiry with Sergeant Joseph Beck and Sergeant George Parrish, Detective Chief Inspector Jim Logan overseeing and PC Martin Helmshore out on the streets. David Ashton, Eunice Prebble and a Woman at a Bus Stop round out the world, the last of them a small reminder that observation is everywhere, even when no one notices.

Valerie Georgeson 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. Amanda Murray plays Lin Mitchell, Phil Smeeton is David Ashton, Betty Alberge is Eunice Prebble, Marlene Sidaway is Beryl Ashton and Marjorie Sudell is the Woman at Bus Stop.

The episode is character-driven in the truest sense, using its procedural frame to expose raw emotional territory. The tragic note it ends on lands because the show has done the work of making the two women feel like neighbours rather than case files.

It is not an easy hour. Loneliness is not an easy subject. But watching the show treat it with seriousness rather than sensation is precisely why Juliet Bravo mattered.