Up the Down Escalator

What arises for Rockliffe and the crime squad as a result of hunger pains? That is the entire published premise, and it is the most cryptic episode of the run: a story that begins with an ordinary physical fact and turns into something the sources never describe.

The sources disagree by a word, TVDB saying pangs where Wikipedia says pains, and neither identifies whose hunger is involved or what it leads to. What can be inferred from the cast is only that the episode's business runs through the station rather than the estate, since the single guest is John Bleasdale as the custody sergeant.

The full seven recruits are on duty, and neither Detective Inspector Flight's rank above nor the superintendent appears, which leaves Rockliffe with the squad and the cells. The episode's structure, a small domestic fact producing a police matter, is the format in miniature: something unremarkable happens, and the squad's response to it is the episode.

Nick Perry wrote this episode and one in the second series, and both take a mundane premise as their starting point, which suggests a writer with an interest in the least promising material. David Attwood directed, one of his five episodes, the most by any director of the eighteen, and the pairing of the run's thinnest premise with its busiest director is one of the small ironies of the production record.

IMDb records 7.3 from 7 votes. Seven votes cannot establish anything, but it is one of only five episodes of this run with a figure at all, and the distribution of those five is a record of which episodes somebody has bothered to rate rather than of which are best.

Bleasdale's Sergeant Oates is the run's recurring uniformed presence, appearing in three episodes across the two series, and the custody suite is where the plain-clothes recruits have least business, which makes him a useful reminder that the station had a uniform side the show mostly kept off screen.

Nothing is recorded about what the hunger leads to, who is affected or how the episode ends, and no reconstruction is offered here. Of the eighteen episodes this is the one where the archive is thinnest: a joke of a premise, a custody sergeant and a rating from seven votes. It is the run's least documented hour, and the honest account of it is a description of its premise and its cast rather than of a plot.