Black Equals White

A demonstration by an equal rights movement has turned into a siege. The protesters have locked several dozen guests inside a hotel dining room and intend to hold them until their demands are met. Dozens of guests are behind that door, and there is no way of resolving it that does not end in somebody getting hurt. Barlow is the man sent to clear the building, and he wants to do it without violence, reasoning his way through a situation that is one bad decision away from disaster. The dining room becomes the stage for the whole episode.

The episode holds its nerve, and so does he. Barlow's plan is to talk rather than storm the doors, to find somebody inside the protest willing to listen. Give the standoff room, and it may defuse itself. It is the kind of careful, humane policing the series admired, and Stratford Johns plays the effort with the right mix of patience and weariness. The wait is the hardest part of the job, and the episode lets the clock do its work. But one of the protesters has other ideas, and the threat of a petrol bomb takes the standoff somewhere much darker. Barlow's plans fail, and the episode refuses to pretend that a good man with good intentions is always enough.

Neville Aurelius's Leroy, James Copeland's Mac, Angus MacKay's Mr. Henry and John Gatrell's Rayburn make up the protest's ranks, with Watt, Insp. Armstrong, PW Det. Con. Donald, PC Snow and PC Knowles on the other side of the locked doors. Elwyn Jones and Allan Prior wrote it, with Keith Williams directing.

The result is a tense, contained hour that treats both sides as human and neither as entirely right. The politics of 1971 hang over it, but the episode's real interest is the practical question of how a policeman ends a standoff without becoming part of the problem. There is no triumphant finale. The petrol bomb sees to that. The answer is not a clean one. It rarely is.