It's All Happening

Rockliffe complains about the workload: drug dealers, rapists, muggers, murderers, thieves and con-men, and then a man called Joseph Maxwell turns up. There is no single crime in the premise at all, and that is why this is the most representative episode of the run.

A working week counted out loud is a better subject for a series about probationers than any individual case, and the hour's structure follows directly from it. The squad's caseload is a queue, not a puzzle, and the episode hands the audience the queue before it introduces the thing that complicates it.

The full seven recruits are on duty: John Blakey's Keith Chitty, Alphonsia Emmanuel's Janice Hargreaves, Joe McGann's Gerry O'Dowd, Bill Champion's David Adams, Martyn Ellis's Paul Georgiou, Brett Fancy's Steve Hood and Susanna Shelling's Karen Walsh. Detective Superintendent Munro is absent from the cast record, so the hour's senior pressure sits at inspector level, with Michael Watkins credited as Detective Inspector Phillips.

The script is by Charlie Humphreys, who wrote one episode of the eighteen and is the run's least-used writer alongside Terry Hodgkinson. The episode's premise reads like the series' own idea of itself, which suggests the script was written as a statement of intent rather than an outlier. A script that counts a squad's caseload out loud is also unusually honest about what a thirteen-week police series has to fill, since every week needs a fresh crop of offences.

Jeremy Ancock directed two episodes, both in the first series, and the production is the standard BBC arrangement of the period: studio videotape, location work around Kensal Rise, station interiors at Canalot Studios, and Leonard Lewis producing with the Campbell and Hart theme over the titles.

This is also the episode with the best evidence behind its reputation. IMDb records 7.6 from 15 votes, the highest figure and the largest sample of the eighteen, and while fifteen votes is not a verdict it is the only figure in this run that rests on more than a handful of opinions. It is why the site recommends this episode alongside the opening hour.

What no source records is who Joseph Maxwell is, who plays him, or what he brings to the week. The premise stops at his arrival, like every summary of this run, and nothing is invented here to fill the space.

What remains is the cleanest statement of the format: seven probationers, a caseload counted out in a sergeant's complaint, and one arrival that turns a routine week into an episode.