Moving Targets

Two boys have walked out of a children's home and are living in an empty caravan on the coast. A series of burglaries follows, and Rockliffe is given the job of finding them before anyone else does. The episode is the strongest premise in the run, and it is also the one with the best writer attached.

Stephen Gallagher's script puts two children at the centre of a police search rather than on the edges of one. Billy and Tom are not suspects in a story about property; they are cold, hungry and stealing to stay alive, and the county force's interest in them begins as a nuisance call and turns into something worse. The episode escalates when a farmer is shot, and the escalation is the point: a rural patch looks peaceful until it is not, and the distances involved mean that a situation can get away from everyone before help arrives.

Gallagher is the reason this hour is worth singling out. He was born in Salford in 1954 and had already written two Doctor Who serials for the BBC, Warriors' Gate in 1981 and Terminus in 1983, before working on this run, and he went on to a long career as a novelist and television writer. It is the only episode of the seven to which a writer of documented standing is attached, and it shows in the way the case is arranged around two children rather than around the police.

Ken Hannam directed. He was an Australian film and television director, born in Melbourne in 1929 and working in British television drama by the end of the 1960s, and the episode's coastal geography, with the caravan site and the sea standing in for the usual country lanes, gives the run a second kind of landscape in its second week.

The regular cast is used as a working office here rather than as a set of introductions. Stephen Churchett's Sergeant Charlie Greville is the uniformed officer who has to answer for the patch, and he recurs through four of the seven episodes. Ian Hogg's Rockliffe is given a test of a different kind from the surrounding weeks: the children he is looking for are the people his force is least equipped to help and most likely to harm.

As with every episode of this run, the outcome is not documented anywhere. The fullest available summary breaks off inside the word shot, at exactly the point where the story turns, and neither the boys nor the shooting nor Rockliffe's hunt has a recorded end. That is a limitation of the archive rather than of the episode, and it is worth stating plainly rather than filling in.

What survives is a 1988 BBC hour about runaway children in which the police are neither villains nor rescuers, written by a man at the start of a substantial career in crime and science fiction, and shot on a coast that gives the series its one soft landscape.