Go for It

The second series opens in Dorset, at the wedding of PC Keith Chitty, with best man Gerry O'Dowd entering into the swing of things. Both men return to London taking no chances, and the episode's promise is that when their paths cross again they get more than they bargained for.

It is a confident way to restart a police series: no crime in the first movement, a wedding instead, and the squad's private lives in front of the audience before anybody puts a uniform on. The second series is generally the more domestic of the two years, and this hour sets that tone.

Brian Croucher joins as Chief Superintendent Barry Wyatt, the run's only significant cast change and its third senior rank alongside Detective Inspector Charles Flight and Detective Superintendent Munro. Croucher appears in five of the ten 1988 episodes, and readers of this site will have met him before as the criminal Raisen in The XYY Man, which is the kind of doubling that a small pool of British character actors produced constantly in the period.

Leonard Lewis, who produced all eighteen episodes, directed this one and the finale, which makes him the only person to take both ends of the second year. The production is otherwise exactly what it was in 1987: studio videotape, location shooting around Kensal Rise, the station interiors at Canalot Studios, and the sung nursery-rhyme theme by Joe Campbell and Paul Hart over the titles.

The recruits are given the private occasion and Ian Hogg's Rockliffe is only one side of the collision the premise describes. Joe McGann's O'Dowd, in jeopardy in the very first episode, has the best man's part, and John Blakey's Chitty has the wedding, which is the series rewarding two of the seven with the domestic material it normally rations.

What the sources do not contain is the collision itself. Nobody records what the two men run into back in London, and the episode's second half exists in the record only as a sentence about getting more than they bargained for. That is the consistent limitation of this run: the situations are published, the outcomes are not.

IMDb holds no rating for this episode, one of thirteen of the eighteen without a figure. The series' only contemporary audience number was published seven weeks after this episode, when the trade paper reported that the show had recently passed ten million viewers, and the same reporting described the BBC planning to retool it into a rural series. That retooling became Rockliffe's Folly in November 1988, which makes this the last opening of the London show before its future was decided.