Witch Hunt

Rockliffe's third episode sets two hunts running at once, and both of them are about a community deciding what a woman is.

In the first strand he goes under cover to find a woman who has contracted AIDS and is deliberately having unprotected sex. In the second, a schoolgirl called Josie Everdene comes from a Pagan family, and when a young biker crashes near her the locals decide that she is a witch. The series then adds a third element, quieter than either: a girl in trouble reminds Rockliffe of his daughter Kathleen, and he decides that it is time to sort out his home life and his job.

The two investigations are the same story told twice. One village hunts a woman because of what she is doing to men, and the other hunts a schoolgirl because of what her family believes, and in both cases the verdict arrives before the evidence does.

That is a sharp piece of construction for a weekly police drama, and it is the clearest demonstration of what the move to Wessex bought the series: material about a community's certainty, which the London runs had no room for.

It is also the episode that has aged worst. A 1988 police series about a woman knowingly transmitting HIV belongs to the panic of its moment, when the public information campaigns were still running and the tabloid version of the story was a woman as a walking danger.

The episode asks its audience to accept that framing, and a modern viewer will read it as a document of the period rather than as a case. The witchcraft material around Josie Everdene wears better, because the mechanism it describes, a village finding its explanation and then its evidence, has not dated at all.

Keith Godman directed, and Vincent O'Connell wrote this episode and no other in the run. Ron Craddock produced and Richard Harvey scored all seven, so the run has a single production signature with a changing set of directors, none of whom handled more than one episode.

The guest cast carries the strands. Jane Wood appears as Mrs Everdene, the mother defending a daughter against people who have already decided about her, and Annabel Leventon and Andrew McCulloch take the credited parts in the first investigation. Ian Brimble's Inspector Yaxley is absent this week, which leaves Rockliffe answering to James Aubrey's DI Hoskins while working under cover in a county where nobody knows him anyway.

The episode is where the run's domestic thread begins properly, with Kathleen named and the promise of a private life to be sorted out. IMDb credits Denise Martill as Kathleen Rockliffe three episodes later, so the thread does get a face, though late.

The outcome of neither investigation is documented in any accessible source, and none is invented here. What the hour leaves is a pair of hunts that say the same thing about small communities, and a piece of late-1980s television that a modern audience will find both more interesting and more difficult than the rest of the run.