Do It Yourself

Vigilantes are a problem for any police force, and they are a worse problem for the officers who half understand why they exist. Maggie Forbes finds herself involved with a group on a housing estate who have decided that official justice moves too slowly, so they will speed it up themselves. Rough justice is the polite term for it. The estate has made its own rules, and Maggie is stuck in the middle of them. Nobody on the square is behaving the way the manuals say they should.

And then a new detective inspector arrives, the last thing the case needs. Jack Slater has to be settled into the team while the investigation is still live, and the atmosphere, already strained by the residents' private law enforcement, does not improve. Maggie is left to balance the fallout from the vigilantes' actions against the procedural disruption of a colleague learning the ropes. There is no tidy way to police people who have given up on the police, and the script knows it.

By the closing credits there is little doubt about where Maggie's sympathies sit. The episode never pretends that policing an estate is tidy, and it wears the mess honestly. Slater's arrival keeps things bumpy to the end.

Guy James and Terence Feely wrote it, and Bill Turner directed. Jill Gascoine's Maggie carries most of the weight, with William Marlowe as Chief Inspector Russell, Paul Moriarty as Sergeant Jake Barratt and Kevin O'Shea as Peter Phillips. Michael Graham Cox plays the new arrival Jack Slater, and the estate is peopled by Dudley Sutton's Ted Oates, Margery Mason's Mrs Felix, Kate Williams as Sheila Oates, Gillian Taylforth as Mary Felix and Elaine Lordan as Tracy Oates.

Serviceable is the word for it, and that is meant kindly. Not every week needs fireworks. This one gets by on the uncomfortable business of neighbours policing neighbours. The estate feels lived-in, which is more than half the battle.