I vaguely recall a TV series that played on the ABC (The Australian Broadcasting Commission, not the U.S. ABC) on weekday afternoons somewhere in the mid-80s. The series was made in the UK and set in London, and was very much a product of the Thatcher regime’s effect on culture (the series wasn’t set during the Thatcher years, but was endemic of the paranoia that seemed to fill a lot of those teen/scifi/dramas at the time).
I don’t remember much about the series, but it focused on a family living during some crisis. they lived in suburban London (I believe the crisis was some sort of cultural breakdown, similar to the Cuban missile crisis, I recall rioting and POLICE (rather than ‘Police’)).
The one episode I recall involved on of the (teenaged) kids going to a party and taking a tinned ham with them as a gift for the family holding the party. There was some enormous fracas that the kid had taken the ham from the family food stash and because hoarding was illegal, there were serious implications that the party-family might report the hoarding-family to the POLICE.
I don’t know if I remember or imagine it, but the episode ended with POLICE breaking in the door to the hoarding family’s house.
Am I insane, or does someone else remember this series?