Ring O' Ring O' Roses

The raid goes wrong almost before it starts. What was meant to be a clean drugs operation turns into a shambles, and into the middle of it walk a group of militant university students who decide Stafford's authority is a fine thing to test. For a chief constable, it is an awkward moment. He cannot win the argument by force, and walking away is not much of a plan either. It takes seconds for the operation to fall apart, and the aftermath takes the rest of the hour.

But the aftermath is where the episode does its work. Officers like Jim Gray and Mike Percher have to pick up the pieces of a botched operation while the students turn the whole affair into a public argument about policing itself. Stafford is left holding a position that is hard to defend and harder to abandon. The students are making a point about the police, and the point has an audience, which makes them harder to dismiss than the usual troublemakers. Nobody looks good in the aftermath, and that is the episode's point.

James Fielding and Jeffrey Caine wrote it, Brian Farnham directed. Karen Archer's Anne Stewart and Tim Pigott-Smith's Stafford anchor the professional side, with Eamon Boland's Jim Gray and Sean Blowers' Mike Percher on the investigative end. Tony Walton's Det. Sgt. Turnbull and Edward Anthony's DC Ferry keep the ground level busy, and Robin Weaver's Camilla gives the student protest a face. Harry Van Gorkum's airman, Colin Starkey's inspector and Darren Ridley's Dave Kent fill out the edges of the hour.

The episode never lets the raid go quiet. It is a brisk, spiky piece about what happens when the people doing the policing lose the argument in public, and it leaves the mess on the pavement where it belongs.