Sirens

Seven probationers in plain clothes spend a week chasing a hooded prowler, an armed robbery and a mugging on a notorious council estate, and one of them, Gerry O'Dowd, ends up in serious trouble. It is a busy week rather than a case, which is exactly what the series wanted: Rockliffe's Babies is about a squad learning on the job, not about a crime being solved.

The episode's most confident decision is when it introduces its lead. Ian Hogg's Sergeant Alan Rockliffe does not appear until the closing scene. The hour belongs to the seven recruits, and the audience meets the man who trains them only after it has watched them make their own mistakes, which is a more interesting way to launch a police drama than an entrance would be.

The estate is the Dragon Estate, and it is not decoration. A population that trusts neither the police nor the young officers pretending to be local is the show's fixed condition, and the episode's setting in the deprived streets of inner London, shot around Kensal Rise, gives the hour a documentary quality that BBC studio videotape would otherwise flatten.

Joe McGann's O'Dowd is the recruit in jeopardy, and TVDB's summary asks whether the oil-rich Sonia Souhami will come to his rescue, which is as much as any source says about how the week ends. Around him are Bill Champion's David Adams, John Blakey's Keith Chitty, Martyn Ellis's Paul Georgiou, Brett Fancy's Steve Hood, Alphonsia Emmanuel's Janice Hargreaves and Susanna Shelling's Karen Walsh, with Edward Wilson as Detective Inspector Charles Flight and Malcolm Terris as Detective Superintendent Munro supplying the ranks above.

The production is BBC in-house on videotape, which dates it usefully: this is the studio method of 1987, not the film look ITV's The Bill was beginning to use. The theme is the run's signature, a sung piece by Joe Campbell and Paul Hart with a children's choir over saxophone and lyrics parodying a nursery rhyme, with lines about a tower block, the social and a father in the dock. It is widely remembered as the best thing about the show, and it is doing work in the first thirty seconds that the scripts sometimes struggle to sustain.

What the episode cannot supply is a resolution. TVDB's account, the fullest published text for this run, ends on a question, and no source records what O'Dowd has done or what becomes of him. That is a limitation of the archive and it applies to all eighteen episodes: the situations are documented, the endings are not.

Anyone starting the series here will see both what it was good at and what it was up against. Seven inexperienced officers working an estate that distrusts them is a premise with genuine drama in it, and a sergeant held back until the last scene is a statement of intent. The comparison every later writer reaches for is The Bill, and Curious British Telly's verdict, that the show is very much in thrall to it without its characters, is a fair description of the series as a whole rather than of this hour, which has an idea of its own.