No Peace

A local newspaper starts a campaign against a travelling community, and the police are left to pick up the pieces. No Peace is about what happens when prejudice gets printed and treated as fact. The paper's hostility stokes real anger, and Hartley's officers have to keep the peace while the people they are meant to protect are being hounded. It is not a mystery in any conventional sense; the question is what the police can do once the damage is done. Words, the episode argues, are part of the policing problem too, and when the paper prints, the streets answer.

Inspector Kate Longton works the fallout with Sergeant Joseph Beck, Sergeant George Parrish, PC Brian Kelleher and PC Danny Sparks. Around them move the men and women of the town caught in the middle: Anthony May's Andy, Joanne Allen's Anthea, Richard Ireson's Hucks, Neil Morrissey's Oliver and Richard Albrecht's John Micklin. The campaign has a name and a byline, but the anger it breeds has neither. The episode keeps its eye on how manufactured outrage spills into the streets, and on how hard it is for the station to stay neutral when public feeling has been wound up deliberately. The travellers themselves get the episode's sympathy, which in 1984 was not a given.

William Humble wrote it, Adrian Shergold directed. Anna Carteret is Kate Longton, with David Ellison as Beck, Noel Collins as Parrish, C.J. Allen as Kelleher and Mark Botham as Sparks. Anthony May plays Andy, Joanne Allen is Anthea, Richard Ireson is Hucks, Neil Morrissey is Oliver and Richard Albrecht is John Micklin.

The episode is a reminder of how much damage words can do before anybody lays a hand on anyone. And the uncomfortable truth at its centre is that the force's job is to manage the mess rather than fix the cause. There is no grand villain behind it all; the machinery is ordinary, and that is what makes it frightening. Nobody in it is entirely right, which is the point. It is a grim, solid hour, the sort that ages well and not in a good way.