Extra Curricular

Rockliffe is surprised to learn that members of his squad find him unapproachable, and his reaction is the episode's joke: does he not always come to their aid when they need him? Then he has to, because Adams goes out on a limb. The first series ends by asking whether the recruits can talk to the man training them, which is the most direct statement of the show's subject in either series.

Bill Champion's PC David Adams carries the jeopardy, and he is the character to give it to: Adams appears in more of the eighteen episodes than any other recruit, which makes him the closest thing the squad has to a constant. Seven recruits are credited, which the series does more often in its finales than in its middle weeks.

The episode gives Edward Wilson's Flight as the only senior officer present, so the hour's pressure is between Rockliffe and his own squad rather than from above. That is the right arrangement for a finale about the sergeant's reputation among the people he is training.

Don Webb wrote it, the second of his five scripts and his last of the first series, and Derek Lister directed, his third and final episode of 1987. The production is the run's standard: videotape, Kensal Rise, Canalot Studios, Leonard Lewis producing, Joan Clark script-editing, and the sung Campbell and Hart theme.

The title is the run's clearest statement on paper that the show was about education rather than crime, which the series had already established by holding its lead back in the opening episode and by ending this one on the squad's internal relationships rather than on a case.

IMDb holds no rating for this episode, and no audience figure exists for it or for any other episode of the run. The only contemporary number attached to the show is the trade-press report of ten million viewers in February 1988, eleven months after this episode, and the same reporting describes the series being retooled later that year into a rural show.

What the ending does is close the first year on the thread the second series continues. Eleven months later three recruits sit selection boards for the Detective Training School in the final episode, and the line runs directly from Rockliffe being told he is unapproachable to the squad's future being formally assessed.

The rescue itself is not documented anywhere. What Adams does, what it costs him and how his sergeant gets him out of it are unrecorded, and nothing is invented here to fill the gap.