Hearts and Flowers

Rockliffe thinks WPC Walsh is too preoccupied with the problems of a homeless family, and he is not entirely impartial himself when it comes to associating with an attractive titled woman who seems to be unattached. The ninth episode of 1988 is the run's most humane hour and the only one that turns the sergeant's judgement back on himself.

Two threads, one squad, one sergeant caught out: a recruit losing her focus to a family on the estate, and a man criticising her while noticing a woman above his own social station. The class pairing is unmistakable, and it is the run's most explicit use of the society its estates belong to.

Joanna McCallum is credited as Lady Christina Collett, the only aristocratic part in the eighteen episodes, and Pauline Quirke appears as Lorraine Morelli. Susanna Shelling's WPC Walsh gets the closest thing any recruit has to a story of her own in the second series' final month, and Malcolm Terris's Munro and Edward Wilson's Flight are both present, with Chief Superintendent Wyatt and PC Hood absent from the cast record.

Diarmuid Lawrence directed this episode and the opening episode of Rockliffe's Folly eight months later, which makes him the only director to work on both runs. His career as a British television director is documented: he began as a production assistant on Pennies from Pennies from Heaven and made his directing debut on Play for Today before working across the BBC's drama output.

Richard O'Keeffe wrote it, as he wrote nine of the eighteen, and the script is the one that gives his creation the most sympathy. A man who criticises a young officer for being distracted by a homeless family, while being distracted himself, is a better character than the temper and the catchphrases would suggest.

IMDb holds no rating for this episode, and neither thread is resolved in any source. What the hour does is show the series at its most socially observant, with a homeless family on an inner-London estate in 1988 as the measure of a police sergeant's inconsistency.

It is the penultimate episode of a show that would be replaced within the year by a rural version of itself, and it is the last time the London squad is given a story about class rather than crime. The pairing of a titled woman and a homeless family is also the closest the series comes to an argument about who belongs where.