The Meat Rack

'The Meat Rack' is one of those titles that tells you exactly what the evening holds. A maniac is slashing prostitutes who work out of a London pub, and the police are running out of ideas. So Maggie does what the job occasionally demands and goes undercover as one of the girls, with a CID detective posing as her pimp. The phrase 'on the game' does a lot of work in that sentence, and the episode does not flinch from it. The undercover work is the risky kind, the sort where one wrong word ends the night badly.

Roger Marshall and Terence Feely wrote it, Gerald Blake directed, and it went out on 3 December 1982. The pub is the centre of the story, and the women who work it get proper faces: Sally, Bella, Christine, Vicki and Rene, played by Lesley Daine, Nichola McAuliffe, Mitzi Rogers, Vicky Ogden and Merdelle Jordine. The episode gives the killer's victims names and faces, which is more than most shows of the era managed. Nichola McAuliffe, who would later wave a scalpel in Surgical Spirit, is particularly good value as Bella. John Bown's Det. Ch. Insp. Len Grout runs the operation alongside Russell and Barratt.

But the uncomfortable truth at the heart of it is that Maggie is asking these women to trust her while she deceives them. The episode knows that, and it lets the tension sit in the pub rather than chasing it down the street. Martin Fisk's Ryan is the kind of small-time menace who makes the place feel genuinely unsafe. Maggie has to be convincing enough to walk into danger and professional enough to walk out of it.

It is not comfortable viewing, and it should not be. The show rarely got this close to the street, and the effort shows. That Maggie survives the assignment on her own terms is the quiet victory at the end of it. It is one of the series' most serious episodes, and one of its best.