Scab

Scab plants the miners' strike squarely in one family. Two brothers-in-law land on opposite sides of the picket line, and the industrial dispute does what it does best: it turns a family table into a battlefield. The strike is everywhere in 1985 Hartley: on the news, on the streets, and now at the dinner table. The title names the charge, and the episode watches the word do its damage between people who are supposed to be kin.

Inspector Kate Longton and her team work the fallout as the division spreads: Sergeant Joseph Beck, Sergeant George Parrish, PC Brian Kelleher and PC Danny Sparks, with Detective Chief Inspector Mark Perrin, played by Edward Peel, on the senior side. The police walk a careful line, because every call they answer has a picket-line echo in it. Longton's part is to keep the peace without choosing a side, and the episode knows how hard that is. The Fisher and Caldwell families carry the drama: Geoffrey Hinsliff's Alan Fisher, Leslie Schofield's John Caldwell, Carolyn Moody's Meryl Fisher and Susie Johns's Tricia Caldwell, all of them stuck on the same streets with different loyalties. The two households are close enough that the split is a physical ache, and the actors sell it.

Ewart Alexander wrote it, Colin Cant directed. Anna Carteret is Kate Longton, with David Ellison as Beck, Noel Collins as Parrish, C.J. Allen as Kelleher, Mark Botham as Sparks and Edward Peel as Perrin. Geoffrey Hinsliff plays Alan Fisher, Leslie Schofield is John Caldwell, Carolyn Moody is Meryl Fisher and Susie Johns is Tricia Caldwell.

The episode is dated in the best way: it remembers the strike as the raw, recent wound it was, and it refuses to let either brother-in-law off. The word in the title is thrown around like a weapon, and nobody is spared it. But the politics stay off-screen; the damage stays on. A family row with a national argument behind it, and no easy reconciliation in sight. It is a small story carrying a very large one.