Sweet and Sour Revenge

A murder has been committed and Rockliffe is given the name of a suspect, and the name brings back fifteen years of bad history. The second episode is the first in the run to belong to the sergeant rather than to the squad, and it is where the character acquires a past.

The published account is one line and a question, whether it is fifteen years too late to do any good, and it is enough to establish the shape: a murder case that turns out to be entangled with something Rockliffe has not settled. For a series whose subject is training, that is a deliberate widening. The recruits are present, but the man supervising them is the one with something at stake.

Kenny Ireland is credited as Danny McAteer, which suggests the suspect or a figure close to him, and John Bleasdale appears as Sergeant Harry Oates, the first of the two regular uniformed sergeants the run used across both series.

Ian Hogg plays the grudge rather than the detection. His Rockliffe is a man whose temper is the character's most visible quality, and an episode that hands him a name from his own history gives that temper something to aim at. It is also the point at which the series starts to look like the police drama of its period: a maverick with a private score is the standard equipment of the 1980s, and later writing about the character describes him as a forerunner of the louder antiheroes that followed.

Two of the seven recruits, PC Chitty and PC Hood, are absent from the episode's cast record, which is worth noting because the ensemble is the show's subject. The squad is not always on duty, and the series rotates its young officers more than a viewer watching consecutive episodes would expect.

Derek Lister directed three episodes, all in 1987, and this was the first of them. The production team is unchanged from the opening hour, with Leonard Lewis producing all eighteen episodes and Joan Clark script-editing, and the sung nursery-rhyme theme bookending the show.

IMDb records a rating of 6.4 from 6 votes for this episode. With six votes it means nothing as a verdict, and the run's figures are so thin that they are best treated as a record of which episodes somebody has bothered to rate at all.

The outcome is not documented, as with every episode of this run, so the question of whether fifteen years is too late goes unanswered. What the hour does is make the sergeant a man with something to answer for, which the first episode had deliberately held back.