Black Arrow

The two married members of Rockliffe's team have a dinner engagement, the demands of duty put paid to their plans, and an entirely different night out on the town is arranged for them, spiced with an element of risk. The eighth episode of 1988 has no crime in its premise at all, which makes it the format's softest and most domestic hour.

The series had been building towards this since the second series opened at a wedding: the recruits' private lives are the show's relief and its variety, and an episode that starts with a dinner engagement is where that thread becomes the whole story. The married pair are not identified in any source, which is a gap rather than a mystery, and nobody records what the substitute evening involves.

The full command structure and the full seven recruits are credited together, which is the largest cast the second series assembles outside the finale. All three senior ranks are present, so the duty that ruins the evening has authority on screen to insist on it, and the episode's conflict is between the job and two people who have plans.

Clive Fleury directed his third and final episode, and Don Webb wrote it, his fourth of five scripts across the run. The production is unchanged: videotape, Kensal Rise, Canalot Studios, the Campbell and Hart theme, and Leonard Lewis producing all eighteen episodes.

The title is the run's most oblique and no source explains it, which fits an episode whose premise contains no crime. The night out with an element of risk is as much as the archive offers, and the reader is left with two married officers, a spoiled dinner and a substitute evening nobody has written up, whose outcome is not recorded anywhere.

IMDb holds no rating for this episode. It went out in March 1988, two weeks before the finale, in a month when the trade press had already reported the series at ten million viewers and described the BBC's plan to move it to a rural setting. A domestic hour in the middle of that is a reminder of what the show was before it was retooled.

For a viewer interested in how BBC series filled thirteen weeks in the late 1980s, this is the honest example: an episode about two officers' spoiled evening, made by a production team that had spent a year and a half on the same estate.