A Bad Few Days

A black teenager with an assessed mental age of six goes missing, and the search becomes an argument about race relations. The fourth episode of the run is its most explicit piece of social writing and the clearest evidence of what the series thought it was about.

The episode's only surviving dialogue is the sharpest thing attached to any hour of this run. TVDB quotes an officer's objection: the missing boy's son is thirteen, has an assessed age of six, weighs eleven stone and is a friend to every stranger he meets, and is he expected to let him find his own way home in the cause of race relations. It is the sole direct quotation from any script of the eighteen that has survived into the sources, and it puts the episode's conflict inside the police station rather than on the estate.

The cast has three of the seven recruits, and the guests carry the institutional weight: Bernard Kay as Inspector Jack Walters, Peter Armitage as Detective Sergeant Hibbert, Stephen Churchett as PC Reg Lacey and Ram John Holder as Wiley Hillam. Churchett is worth noticing for readers of this site, since he appears in the rural successor to this series as Sergeant Charlie Greville and is credited in the site's entry for Lewis with developing that show as a writer.

Brian Thompson wrote this episode and one other, and the pairing is consistent: his two scripts are the run's two episodes about the force's own conduct, this one and the second series' Looking After Your Own. David Attwood, the run's most-used director with five episodes, handles the hour.

The series had been built on an estate whose residents distrust the police, and this episode is where that stops being a setting and becomes the story. A missing vulnerable teenager, a search conducted by officers whose attitude is being questioned, and a line of dialogue that states the objection rather than the moral, is about as direct as a 1987 BBC crime drama got on the subject.

IMDb holds no rating for this episode, one of thirteen of the eighteen without one, and no source records how the search ends.

What the hour does leave is a period document. Its treatment of race reads very differently in 2026 from in 1987, and it is that difference, rather than any formal innovation, that makes it worth watching now: a mainstream BBC crime series making an episode about a learning-disabled black teenager and the force searching for him.