The Aggro Boy

An important soccer match means crowd control duty for the Task Force, and Watt and Hawkins spend the night coordinating an operation that is really an exercise in temperament management. It is a cold night with a full ground and a crowd that only needs one spark.

The spark has a name. A young hooligan is planning to make himself a spectacle by drowning his aggression in blood and violence, and what should have been a routine evening turns into a desperate race against time for Barlow and Watt. The hunter becomes the hunted, and the reversal happens faster than anyone expects.

And there are two young boys to worry about as well, in genuine trouble at the match, and the Task Force finds itself trying to protect them from the consequences of their own actions while the bigger storm gathers. The episode keeps both strands in view: the individual threat and the accidental trouble.

Elwyn Jones and Allan Prior wrote it, Vere Lorrimer directed. Stratford Johns is Barlow, Frank Windsor's Watt, Norman Bowler's Hawkins, with David Lloyd Meredith as Sgt. Bob Evans and Terence Rigby as PC Henry Snow. Bill Straiton plays Chief Insp. Logan, and the Dickson family arrive in force: Windsor Davies as Tom, a few years before It Ain't Half Hot Mum made him a household name, Bernadette Milnes as Sue, Barry McCarthy as Dixie and Charles Bolton as Ginger.

Crowd control episodes tend to be about numbers, but this one narrows to individuals. The game itself is the least dangerous thing about the night; the violence comes from a single young man with something to prove, and the trouble finds two boys who did not mean to be there. The men in the middle are trying to keep the peace between them all. That is the job, and they do it, right up to the final whistle.