Trouble Maker

Most episodes are about the crime. "Trouble Maker" starts the day after. The task force has assisted in a drug bust at a house full of black tenants, and the fallout is exactly what the force should have known was coming: bad press and angry questions, with a black activist lawyer named Fordyce pressing the point. Cy Grant plays him with the calm certainty of a man who has heard every excuse the police have to offer. But it is the kind of episode that dates well, because the questions it asks are still being asked.

The order comes down that Watt should investigate the whole thing thoroughly, and the episode is at its best in the uncomfortable spaces that opens up. Honest officers did their job, and the community does not trust them. In the middle sits a chief superintendent who has to decide whether the force is being accused of something or caught at something. Lee Davis' Holder and Susan Derrick's Mrs Best keep the human cost in view. The investigation is the story, and the story is the investigation; there is no chase scene to hide behind.

Elwyn Jones and Alan Plater wrote it, Leonard Lewis directed. Gay Hamilton's Jean Watt is there to remind her husband that the job follows him home, and Walter Gotell's Cullen makes sure the political temperature is felt at the top. Harry Hawkins, played by Norman Bowler, works the case with his usual steadiness.

For its time, this was brave territory for a police series, and it is handled without slogans. Nobody is entirely wrong, and the episode says so without picking a side. When the public stops believing the police, even the right bust goes sour, and the episode leaves that thought hanging. Grant's Fordyce is the best argument it makes, and he makes it standing still.