A Very Diplomatic Incident

A night of routine surveillance for the crime squad is quiet until it is not, and the squad then finds itself in areas of enquiry foreign to it, with choices to be made between public justice and private revenge. The sixth episode of 1988 is the run's most charged premise and its most closed cast list.

The episode is unusual in having no guests at all in the available record: the seven recruits, Chief Superintendent Wyatt, Detective Inspector Flight and nobody else. For an hour of British television in 1988 that is a striking piece of economy, and it keeps the audience inside the squad for the whole fifty minutes. That gives the hour a hermetic quality, since the only people on screen are the squad and its commanding officer, and the choice the premise describes has to be made between them.

Terry Hodgkinson wrote this episode and no other of the eighteen, which makes him the run's least-used writer and the one whose single script takes the show's idea furthest. A case described as foreign to the squad, with a choice between justice and revenge, is about what police officers are entitled to do when the ordinary rule book does not appear to apply.

Keith Washington directed, his second and last episode. Every director of the run except David Attwood worked on no more than three, and Leonard Lewis produced all eighteen, so the variation in the series comes from its writers far more than from its production.

The title's word diplomatic is the clue the sources leave unopened. The interference of status with policing is a subject the series otherwise avoids, and a BBC crime drama in 1988 raising it while the force was being reported as complacent about race and violence is a more interesting piece of programming than the retrospective line about it being a pale imitation of The Bill would suggest.

IMDb holds no rating for this episode. This transmission fell on 19 February 1988, the day after the trade press reported the show at ten million viewers and described the BBC's plan to retool it, which means the series was being discussed as a scheduling problem on the same weekend this hour went out.

Nothing records what the squad watches, what makes the enquiry foreign, or which way the officers go between justice and revenge. What can be said is that the premise puts the choice where 1980s police drama rarely put it: in the hands of the constables as much as their sergeant. The title implies a third party with status on the other side of the decision, and the sources never confirm it.