In The Public Gaze

Chief Constable Cullen gets his hands dirty for once, and the whole department pays for it. A chief constable in the witness box is a rare sight, and the episode knows it. He witnesses a police officer being badly beaten and steps in to help the young constable, and one of the culprits responds by making allegations against him. And from there the case stops being about the attack and becomes about the chief constable's own conduct, with a court appearance looming and one of the defendants dying as a consequence of the intervention that saved a young bobby.

It is a neat reversal of the usual order. The man who usually watches from the top of the organisation suddenly finds himself at the centre of its scrutiny, every move he made on that night now required to be defensible in public. Walter Gotell's Cullen is well suited to the discomfort, a figure of authority discovering that authority has a price. He accepts Inspector Armstrong's help, and the partnership between the two men is the quiet heart of the episode. Terrence Hardiman's Armstrong is exactly the steadying presence the story needs.

Stratford Johns is on hand as Barlow, watching his boss's ordeal from a respectful distance, and the supporting cast fills out the consequences: Reginald Marsh as Chief Supt. Ted Leach, Thomas Ellice as PC Pugh, Gawn Grainger as Robert Wilson, Patricia Lawrence as Mrs. Raynes and Kenneth Watson as Mr. Gower. The episode never lets the audience forget that the man under scrutiny is also the man who runs the force.

Elwyn Jones wrote it and Peter Cregeen directed. The episode understands that the most uncomfortable place in policing is the witness box, and that the public gaze of the title is not an abstraction. It is a room full of people deciding whether a chief constable acted like a policeman or a thug. The answer, when it comes, is not entirely comfortable either.