Easy Meat

Rockliffe's team is in hospital watching for someone who is frightening the nurses, and when a nurse is hurt in front of them they realise they have a different and more urgent situation on their hands. The fifth episode of 1988 is built on the failure of a watch, which is the training-series premise at its most uncomfortable.

A police team placed to prevent something, and the thing happening while they watch, is the format's own subject turned against the squad. The run's recruits are probationers learning in public, and an hour in which the lesson is delivered at their expense is a sharper idea than another case would be.

Edward Wilson's Flight is the only officer above Rockliffe present, with neither Wyatt nor Munro credited, so the consequences of a failed watch land on the inspector's desk. Carl Rigg appears as Detective Constable 'Bolo' Donnington and Alan Carr as Detective Constable Redway, two officers from outside the squad, which suggests the hospital operation involved more than the seven recruits.

Don Webb's third script of the second series and his fourth of five overall, with Clive Fleury directing his second of three episodes. The hospital is the run's only sustained setting away from the estate and the station, and it gives the episode a different geography and a different pace from the street weeks.

This is also the episode transmitted five days before the trade paper put the series at ten million viewers, which is the only contemporary audience figure attached to the show and is single-sourced. It is worth recording next to this hour because the episode's subject, a squad whose prevention fails, is the sort of material the same paper's later reporting framed as a problem as the BBC tightened its policy on staged violence.

IMDb holds no rating for this episode, and nothing is recorded about the person frightening the nurses, the injury or the response. The title is the run's bluntest and tells the audience how the person responsible saw the nurses, which is as much as the sources allow.

The hospital setting also gives the second series its only hour in which the squad is entirely out of its own territory, working a building rather than an estate. For a viewer looking for the series at its least comfortable, this is the hour: a watch that does not prevent what it was set to prevent, and a squad watching it happen.