Doubt

Some episodes of a police show open on a body. This one opens on the officers themselves, because Maggie Forbes and Jimmy Fenton take a severe beating during a robbery, and the rest of the hour is about what that does to them. The robbery is the sort of job that should end in paperwork and a caution; instead it leaves two of their own hurt, and the squad carries a quiet fury about it for the rest of the hour.

The aftermath matters more than the beating itself: two detectives who are now victims, and a squad that has to keep working while its people heal. The witnesses were too hurt or too terrified to see anything clearly. The trail goes cold in a dozen places, and the case has to be rebuilt from people who were busy being hurt when it happened. The episode is a study in resilience, in the bluntest sense: it watches Maggie and Jimmy carry on, and it never pretends that getting battered in the line of duty is something you shake off. But their bruises are in every scene, even the ones where nobody mentions them.

Anthony Biggam and Terence Feely wrote it, Paul Annett directed. Jill Gascoine is Maggie, Derek Thompson is Fenton, and around them come William Marlowe's Russell, Brian Gwaspari's Bob Croft and Nigel Rathbone's Steve. Christopher Villiers plays PC Ian Harding, David Daker is Sam Taylor, Geoffrey Freshwater plays John, Christopher Ellison is Wally and Edward Peel plays Jacko.

It's the physicality that stays with you. The show asks its actors to carry real weight, and they do, right down to the flinch. There's no tidy moral at the end, just work resumed, which is about as honest as television gets about what the job costs. Watching it, you're glad these two are fictional, and gladder still that the show treats their pain as something that matters.