Nine-Tenths of the Law

The last of the seven episodes is about land, and so was the first. Rockliffe's Folly ends where it began, with property in a county where property is the whole argument.

George Maplethorpe asks Rockliffe to investigate a businessman called Jeremy Bryce. The complaint is that Bryce bought council land through a proxy, for a riding school, and then sold it on for two hundred thousand pounds, and that the new owner intends to build a housing estate. The series' own line for the episode is simply that someone is buying a great deal of land on Rockliffe's patch and that business is not proceeding as usual.

That is a story with no violence in it, and it is a deliberate end for a run that had opened with a death by pesticide on farmland. In the first episode the crime was a body on the land; in the last the land itself is the crime, and the machinery is a proxy purchase, a change of use and a profit made out of something the county sold off cheaply. The show's class politics, which had been present but quiet, are stated plainly here and left unresolved.

The guest cast gives the final hour its weight. Sylvia Syms, the most established actor the run booked, appears as Adella Simcox; Michael Cochrane plays John Brooke; Shelagh McLeod plays Grace Downes; and Glyn Grain plays Jeremy Bryce, the businessman whose dealings are the complaint. The complainant, Maplethorpe, appears in TVDB's account but not among IMDb's credited players, so either the part is uncredited or the two records describe him differently.

Susannah Hagan wrote the episode, and she wrote the first one, so the run opens and closes with the same hand. Alan Wareing directed, a British television director with a long list of BBC drama credits in the period. Ron Craddock produced all seven and Richard Harvey scored all seven, which makes the pair of them the run's only consistent signatures.

The office is thinned again for the finish, with James Aubrey, Elizabeth Heery and John Hartley all absent, so the closing hour belongs to Ian Hogg's Rockliffe with Ian Brimble, Aaron Harris, Carole Nimmons and Craig Nightingale around him. It is the last time the character appears on screen: no eighth episode was made, the run was never repeated, and Network's DVD release of the parent series stops short of this seven and says so on the sleeve.

That is the series' ending, as far as the record goes: seven weekly Wednesday episodes in the autumn of 1988, transmitted to no recoverable press, and a final case whose outcome is in no accessible source. What can be said for it is that it knew what it was about. A rural force in a county of farms and big houses, a detective who had been sent out of London, and land, from the first hour to the last.