On the Big Wheel

The creator of Rockliffe wrote this episode, and it is the one that tests the whole point of moving the character out of London.

Jimmy Henty has been at sea for fifteen years after a bank robbery, sailing with his girlfriend Tania, and he has come home. Rockliffe recognises him, and the Metropolitan Police's robbery squad takes an interest. That is the premise, and it is enough: a county officer knows a face that a London squad wants, and the choice about what to do with the man is being made somewhere else.

The episode is the run's clearest statement about jurisdiction. Everything the show gained by sending Rockliffe to Wessex, which is a patch he can know and a community he can read, is tested the moment his old force arrives to claim what he has found. His knowledge of Henty is no longer a professional asset in the county where it happens to be useful; it is a piece of London information sitting in the wrong office.

The casting fits the idea. Eric Allan plays Henty as a man who has spent fifteen years not hiding well but living openly at sea, which is a specifically coastal version of going on the run. Lisa Geoghan plays Tania, and John Flanagan appears as Insole. Laura Davenport's first of three credited appearances is here, as Cassie, a name that gains a surname in the following two episodes.

Richard O'Keeffe created Rockliffe's Babies and wrote this episode and no other of the seven, which makes it the only point in the final run where the series' own originator is doing the writing. He is credited as Richard O'Keefe on this script, and both spellings appear across the source records. The rest of the run was written by Susannah Hagan, Stephen Gallagher, Vincent O'Connell, John McNeil and John Foster.

Tristan de Vere Cole directed. He was a British television director with a long career and a documented family in British art and naval life, none of which bears on the episode, but which makes him the sort of appointment a BBC drama of the period routinely made.

The regular office is thinner again this week: both James Aubrey's DI Hoskins and Carole Nimmons' WPS Osborne are absent, leaving Rockliffe with Ian Brimble's Yaxley and the uniformed constables. John Hartley's PC Duggan and Craig Nightingale's PC Overton are now established as the pair who do the legwork, and the episode uses them to put the county's response in the hands of men who have never heard of the robbery.

The end of the episode is not recorded anywhere, as is the case with all seven, and no ending is claimed for it here. What the hour does do is set out the tension the series was built on, at the point in the run where a viewer can best judge whether the transfer earned its keep.