Klansmen

The Empire Society is a white supremacist group run by a man called Hulton, and it has taken to terrorising London's black residents in an effort to drive them out of the area. It is the series' most uncomfortable episode by some distance, and it does not soften the material. Bodie's own behaviour comes under scrutiny when he meets a mixed-race couple and seems to show a prejudice of his own, and then he is badly injured and ends up in hospital, out of the action for the middle stretch of the story.

With Bodie out of the way, Doyle goes undercover inside the Society. What he finds is that the violence is not just bigotry, it is business. A property developer called Miller is using the group to force black tenants out of their homes, and the revelations get worse from there. When Miller's identity finally comes out, it lands as a shock to everyone, including the men who have been doing the dirty work. Undercover work has never suited Doyle, and here it means swallowing his pride along with his cover.

Brian Clemens and Simon Masters wrote it, and Pat Jackson directed. Edward Judd is Hulton, with Trevor Thomas as Zadie, Sheila Ruskin as Helen, Anthony Booth as Dinny, Lawrie Mark as Tommy, Oscar James as Topaz and Joseph Charles as Jax. The episode is blunt about what it is showing: racist violence presented without glamour, and a hospital staff, largely black, who pull Bodie through his recovery.

The healing is the point of the ending. Bodie owes his life to the people he had been so quick to judge, and the episode lets him reckon with that. It is clumsy in places and dated in others, and it is more honest than most television of the time would have dared to be.