In the Wake of Terror

A bomb goes off in Norwich's Royal Arcade and the suspicion falls on the IRA. Cade's problem is not the blast so much as being kept out of the loop. Special Branch refuses to let the force release images of the suspects to the press, and Cade does not take the snub quietly. Then a commuter train full of children becomes the next target, and public outrage lands on his desk. The press wants the pictures, Special Branch wants control. The public just wants someone to blame before the next train leaves. For a force that polices a county rather than a capital, it is a new kind of pressure.

Michael Byrne's Sir Robert Eaton and Barry Jackson's Commander Jim Keegan show him how the national security game is played, while Karen Archer's ACC Anne Stewart, Michael Cochrane's Nigel Crimmond and Stuart McGugan's Det. Chief Supt. Sean McCloud keep the Eastland side moving. Fiona Walker's Lady Eaton, Ayub Khan-Din's Councillor Mani Shankar, Tony Caunter's Arthur Quine and Juliette Mole's Marie-Pierre Arnoux fill out the frame. Their advice is polite, firm and full of reasons to do nothing. The episode is unusually good on the grammar of these stand-offs: who tells whom what, and who gets to decide.

And if the bombs were not enough, his girlfriend leaves him. The show lets the personal and the professional collapse into the same week, which is probably exactly what a real chief constable's week looks like. The exit is handled without melodrama, which makes it sting more.

Jeffrey Caine and Ray Jenkins wrote it, A.J. Quinn directed.

It is a sobering hour about the price of the top job: the public glare and the departmental advice that contradicts itself. The episode never lets Cade off the hook, and neither should it. Watching him argue with Special Branch while the public shouts for heads is uncomfortable television, and it stays uncomfortable. There is no triumph at the end, just survival, and this show has never been ashamed of that. The episode takes its title seriously: this is life after the blast, not during it.