The More Things Change

The third series opens with everyone in a new arrangement. Spender is dating a woman called Sandy. Frances has settled with Eric and intends to marry him, and the two of them agree to sign the divorce papers that formally end the marriage. Stick and Keith each have someone new. The private lives of the regulars are reset across the board in a single episode, which is what the title is telling you.

The professional strand is an investigation into attacks on women in a local park, and it is treated as a matter of public danger and police procedure rather than as a puzzle. Spender is in the park with Kate and Laura when he encounters the attacker, chases him and loses him. Later, at the same spot, an undercover officer is about to be attacked. Spender intervenes and gives chase again, following the man onto the railway and running along the track after a train. The Metro-track pursuit, out of the Jesmond Dene area towards the city centre, is the set piece the series is remembered by, and thirty years later the local press was still singling it out.

Two smaller strands run underneath. Keith, a musician and shopkeeper, is being bootlegged by a man operating at the railway station, and Spender agrees to look into it. It supplies a low-stakes parallel to the park investigation and keeps the record trade among the small local rackets the series uses to ground its Tyneside. Stick, meanwhile, is involved with some hot jewellery, and he takes Eileen to dinner to celebrate, inviting Spender and Sandy and Keith and Emily along.

The dinner is where the episode turns. Sandy's husband arrives and tells Spender that Sandy is his wife, which means Spender has unknowingly been seeing a married woman. It is played for sting as much as for humour, and it is the season's pattern in miniature: everyone's new arrangements are more fragile than they look. The honest objection is that the revelation depends on Spender not knowing something a detective of his competence might reasonably have checked, which is coincidence doing the work of character.

Giving Kate and Laura a direct view of the attacker is the better choice, since it puts the daughters into a case rather than confining them to the domestic subplot. Boyd and Gillespie are used lightly here, more lightly than later instalments will use them. There is no DVD release and no official streaming availability, so this run survives largely on memory and on the Newcastle locations, which are the other thing the episode does well. The park, the track, the dinner and the dole-era city all look like the place they are.