Jobs for the Boys

Jobs for the Boys begins with a complaint that sounds small: residents are worried about a gang of teenage boys going door to door asking for work. The episode treats the concern seriously and watches it grow. But in a town with not enough jobs, boys who want them badly enough can drift into something darker. The boys are not menaces, or not yet; they are a problem the town has decided to be frightened of. The doorsteps of Hartley are the setting, and the episode knows those doorsteps well.

Inspector Kate Longton and her team take the measure of the situation: Sergeant Joseph Beck, Sergeant George Parrish, PC Brian Kelleher and PC Danny Sparks, with WPC Sheila Saunders (Julie Foulds) and Detective Chief Inspector Mark Perrin (Edward Peel) in support. Each complainant has a slightly different story, and the differences are where the police start. The community's men of substance supply the friction: Charles Bartholomew's Geoffrey Pilchard, John Basham's Barney Preston and Tom Davidson's Ken Ridley. Ridley, Pilchard and Preston are the sort of names that make a town feel real.

Wally K. Daly wrote it, Roderick Graham directed. Anna Carteret is Kate Longton, with David Ellison as Beck, Noel Collins as Parrish, C.J. Allen as Kelleher, Mark Botham as Sparks, Edward Peel as Perrin, Julie Foulds as Sheila Saunders, Charles Bartholomew as Geoffrey Pilchard, John Basham as Barney Preston and Tom Davidson as Ken Ridley.

The episode understands that a complaint about teenagers is rarely just about teenagers. It is about work and money and boredom, and about what a town does with its young men. The police end up as social workers with handcuffs, and the show wears that awkwardness honestly. The episode never decides that the boys are simply victims, which would be the easy way out. It is a story about work, in a decade when work was the thing everybody was arguing about. A solid, grounded hour with its heart in the right place.