Tolerant and slow to anger though we are, the British public can never excuse some evils. Cruelty to puppies is one. Sneering at the late Queen is another.
But most reprehensible of all, a crime beyond forgiveness, is being horrid to Rose Ayling-Ellis.
Craig Revel Horwood found this out to his cost on Strictly Come Dancing in 2021, when he was the only judge not to award Rose the full ten points for her semi-final waltz with Giovanni Pernice.
Craig gave her a measly nine, and was roundly castigated from all quarters.
Actor Andrew Buchan is likely to find himself shunned in the street for his performance as crabby DI James Marsh, in Code Of Silence.
We can tell he’s a martinet and a bully from the moment he gives her a condescending smile, before telling colleagues she isn’t up to the job.
How dare he?! Our lovely Rose, so diffident and naive, yet dauntlessly brave? He ought to consider himself jolly lucky to have her on the team.
The job in question is lip-reading for a police surveillance unit, stalking a gang of robbers suspected of planning a heist on a jewel vault.
In ITV's Code of Silence, Rose Ayling-Ellis (above) plays dinner lady Alison Woods, plucked from the police canteen to watch covert video footage and decode what the robbers are saying
Writer Catherine Moulton shows, without labouring the point, how police and catering bosses alike imagine Alison must be a bit thick, because she’s deaf. Above, Alison and Liam Bayne (played by Kieron Moore)
Even the officer who first spots her potential, DS Ashleigh Francis (Charlotte Ritchie, left), treats her as an appealing but innocent child
Rose plays dinner lady Alison, plucked from the police canteen to watch covert video footage and decode what the robbers are saying.
Writer Catherine Moulton shows, without labouring the point, how police and catering bosses alike imagine Alison must be a bit thick, because she’s deaf.
They talk down to her and begin with the assumption that she’ll struggle with whatever they ask of her, whether that’s serving an oat milk latte or identifying the target of a multi-million-pound robbery.
Even the officer who first spots her potential, DS Francis (Charlotte Ritchie), treats her as an appealing but innocent child. Alison is never bitter, but the frustration sometimes shows through.
‘I don’t want to be hearing,’ she complains to her mother (Fifi Garfield), ‘I just want other people to be a bit deaf.’
It’s easy to believe that, fed up of being underestimated, Alison will take reckless risks to prove herself useful.
'She’s our Rose, a national treasure in the making,' says TV critic Mr Stevens. Above, the actress attending the 2025 Olivier Awards
These include getting a job as a barmaid at a pub owned by the chief villain (Joe Absolom), and chatting up the gang’s computer hacker, Liam (Kieron Moore).
This is no hardship, since Liam clearly fancies the socks off her, and can’t believe his luck that she’ll even talk to him — especially after he knocks her off her bike. What he doesn’t know, of course, is that she was trying to tail his car at the time.
Charming and a bit goofy though he is, Liam is part of a vicious gang. The moment last night at the end of the second episode, when he and his boss caught Alison spying on them over the pub’s CCTV, was genuinely alarming.
She’s our Rose, a national treasure in the making. We don’t want to see her in any worse jeopardy than a dodgy cha-cha-cha.
