Top Man

Acting on information received seems more important to Rockliffe than taking notice of a memo from the Chief Superintendent, and embarrassment results, except for Georgiou, who volunteers for a very risky adventure. The seventh episode of 1988 is a comedy of a sergeant ignoring a piece of paper, and it is the one place in the run where the squad's least promising recruit gets the moment that matters.

Martyn Ellis's Paul Georgiou was introduced in the opening episode as the habitually lazy member of the seven, and an episode that hands him the volunteer's part fifteen months later is the series paying off a character thread. It is the closest the eighteen episodes come to a completed development, and it arrives in the penultimate month.

The memo is the episode's other joke. A sergeant who prefers his own intelligence to a written instruction is the show's central conflict reduced to a piece of stationery, and the embarrassment that follows is the format's cheapest and most reliable engine. A piece of paper causing a police crisis is a very 1980s joke, and the show tells it without apology. Nick Perry wrote it, his second script after Up the Down Escalator, and both episodes begin with a small bureaucratic fact rather than a crime.

Bill McCabe is credited as Sergeant Benyon, his only appearance in the episode records although the series' cast lists carry him among the regulars, and neither Wyatt nor Munro appears, which leaves the memo's author off screen and the authority in the hour at inspector level. David Attwood directed his fifth and last episode of the run, the most by any director.

IMDb holds no rating for this episode, and no source records what the information was, what the memo said or what Georgiou volunteers for. The production is the standard BBC arrangement of 1988: videotape, Kensal Rise, Canalot Studios, Leonard Lewis producing, Joan Clark script-editing.

What the hour establishes is how completely the series had settled into its own shape by March. A memo, a volunteer and an embarrassment is not a police story in any conventional sense, and the show had reached the point where its own working life was the subject.

It is also the last of the three episodes before the finale, which puts the selection boards a fortnight away and makes Georgiou's adventure the last of the run's individual stories about a recruit.