Pressures

A multiple murder is a professional problem with a human cost, and 'Pressures' is about the human cost. The crime scene is bad enough to shake the people who see it, and this week it does. Maggie shows the strain first, and then Russell starts to crack, which is the more worrying development because nobody has ever seen Russell crack. The details of the scene stay vague, which is the right call; the damage is in the eyes of the people who saw it.

Kenneth Ware and Terence Feely wrote it, Nic Phillips directed, and it went out on 14 January 1983. The episode does something the series rarely tried: it makes the police the patients. Pamela Buchner's Janie Russell and Katherine Stark's Helen Croft give the senior ranks a domestic life worth worrying about, and Richard Borthwick's Superintendent Parker hovers with the grim patience of a man waiting for the bill. Stewart Bevan's Ray Gillespie and Peter Joyce's PC Griffiths carry the case work while their superiors wobble, and Hugh Martin's Doctor delivers the kind of news nobody in the room wants.

The show has always been good at Maggie's steadiness, so it is a change of pace to watch her struggle and then steady herself while the man above her cannot. But William Marlowe gets the best scenes of his run here, playing a decent man coming apart under the weight of what the job shows him. The episode is generous to both of them, and cruel to neither.

It is a sombre episode, and the series is the better for having made it. The killer is almost beside the point. The real subject is the people who have to look at the mess and keep working, and the episode never pretends that costs nothing. Russell's family scenes are the quiet heart of it. It is the sort of story that used to be called 'issue television', and the label undersells it.