In Too Deep

Why are the officers of Church Street police station tuning in to a local radio station, and why does Rockliffe allow himself to be involved in a situation which causes so much disapproval from on high? The third episode of the second series is built on insubordination, and it is the only place in the run's published record where the squad's police station is named.

That naming is a small piece of research value. Church Street is a real Marylebone address and the show's London is the north-west of the city, which matches the Kensal Rise filming and gives the site's entry something firmer than an unbranded station.

The episode's substance is the conflict between a sergeant acting on his own judgement and a senior officer who disapproves of it. Brian Croucher's Wyatt is the source of that disapproval, and the character exists across the second series to be the institutional objection to Rockliffe's method, which is the pattern that earns the show its later comparison with harsher police antiheroes.

Edward Wilson's Flight is present but not the objecting party, and the distinction is deliberate in the second series: the inspector is the sergeant's colleague, while the uniformed ranks are his constraints. The full seven recruits are credited, so the hour's work is done by the squad while its sergeant is in trouble.

Keith Washington directed two episodes of 1988, this one and A Very Diplomatic Incident seven weeks later, and Don Webb wrote it, his third of five scripts across the run. The local radio station is the episode's period marker: a police squad monitoring a broadcast dates the hour to a moment when local radio was a new presence in London, and it gives the case a flavour the estate weeks do not have.

IMDb holds no rating for this episode, one of thirteen without a figure, and the sources do not record what is on the radio or how the disapproval is expressed. What the premise does establish is the show's central proposition stated as a plot: a sergeant who prefers his own information to his superiors' instructions, training recruits to follow instructions.

The episode also sits four weeks before the trade press reported the series at ten million viewers, and three weeks before the same paper reported that the BBC intended to move it to a rural setting. The London show had five episodes left when this one went out.