The film, written by Michael Eaton, produced by Nigel Stafford-Clark and directed by Peter Kosminsky, was made by Zenith Productions for the ITV company Yorkshire Television, and screened in two parts over successive nights in June 1990.

However, the programme was not broadcast in Northern Ireland itself, a precaution that Ulster Television said reflected legal advice that it might prejudice future inquests on the deceased, which had been suspended.

The first two-hour part dramatises the events in late 1982 that lay behind the inquiry: the killing of three policemen by a massive landmine at Kinnego embankment in County Armagh; the fatal shooting of three members of the IRA, who turned out to be unarmed, in a car at Craigavon; the shooting dead of civilian Michael Tighe and wounding of Martin McCauley, also found to be unarmed, at a hayshed in Ballyneery near Lurgan; and the killing of two INLA members, again discovered to be unarmed, in a car at Mullacreavie Park, near Armagh; along with the creation of adjusted or fabricated accounts of the actions of RUC Special Support Unit members in the events, some of which unravelled in court in March 1984.

The RUC's Special Support Unit (SSU) undergoes practice training for a hostage release, briefed to use "speed, firepower and aggression".

At the barracks, the SSU men listen to a television news report: on a routine patrol, they had seen a gunman entering the barn, and heard the sound of a rifle being cocked.

A senior officer carpets DCI Flanagan and his Detective Inspector for the failures of the SSU, culminating in their having "topped the only Taig in County Down with no connection to the paramilitaries".

An RUC man harangues Stalker for the embarrassment he has caused the force, talking to a "flaming Provie", someone who is even worse than the IRA, and whose brother is a wanted terrorist on the run.

Back at the inquiry offices, the head of Special Branch is surprised when Stalker opens the interview with a formal caution, on the grounds of suppressing evidence and misleading the DPP.

Stalker informs Hermon as a parting shot that in connection with his inquiry, he will be wanting to interview the RUC's most senior officers, including Sir John himself, under formal caution.

The Detective Inspector from RUC Special Branch has gone to Belfast Airport, then talked to Flanagan at the Police College, and finally seen a prisoner in a northern English jail.

Kosminsky, who had producer-directed the documentaries The Falklands War: the Untold Story (1987), Cambodia: Children of the Killing Fields (1988) and Afghantsi (1988) for the strand, was keen to take the subject on.

"[2] Although Kosminsky distrusted "faction", and had told the press he "hated" this "evil form",[5][6] he began to think of putting the research that had been gathered into a drama format, to make best use of the contacts that had been achieved.

Given the amount of research that had already been done, and the need to be led by it, Eaton said of his role and that of writers working on similar projects "We are structuralists rather than dramatists − producers want us to supply form and structure.

For Kosminsky it was his first experience of directing a television drama, an undertaking that, with a budget of £1.5 million, a cast of 125, a crew of 80, and 500 extras,[4] was on an altogether bigger scale than the investigative documentaries he had previously made.

Rather, Kosminsky said he wanted the film to reveal a lot of "new information, which is not so far in the public domain, largely from the experiences of John Thorburn"; and he said that his aim was that "whatever view the audience comes to about the rights and wrongs of the issue, they will at least know the events, the facts − what happened".

[8] This information, according to The Times, included new details of how the operation against Dominic McGlinchy had ended in a "murderous farce",[7] building on what had come out at the trial of RUC Constable John Robinson.

Allegedly he had also been in a position to send these same men out on an operation to kill an RUC reservist, into the line of fire of a police ambush, making him an agent provocateur and, as Hugh Hebert put it in The Guardian, "creating the conditions in which assassination is inevitable".

What it did represent was a particular SAS-style training exercise undertaken by the RUC Special Support Unit, emphasising its mantra of "Firepower, Speed, Aggression", with a briefing to the participants about what they should and shouldn't do: "1.

In the event however, they stipulated only that the film be preceded by a caption to say that it was a drama-documentary; and that some adjustment be made to the wording of a final caption noting the statement to Parliament by the Attorney General Sir Patrick Mayhew in January 1988, that although there was evidence of RUC officers obstructing and perverting the course of justice, he had advised the Director of Public Prosecutions for Northern Ireland that due to considerations of national security a prosecution of those officers would not be in the public interest.

[7] However, in an interview on 31 May, three days before transmission, Sir John accused the film of containing false and inaccurate information and giving neither a factual nor objective portrayal of the shootings.

The decision was attacked by the local MP for Armagh, the Social Democratic and Labour Party's (SDLP) Seamus Mallon; and also by the production company Zenith, who called it "appalling and shameful" that the people most affected by the issues in the programme would be prevented from seeing it.

Kosminsky said he found it hard to understand, given the amount that had already been published on the Stalker case, how UTV could accept legal advice that the programme could prejudice juries at inquests that might not be held for at least a year.

[23] Trimble particularly objected to a rhetorical line that what had been going on was "not Dixon of Dock Green − it's more like some death squad out of a banana republic",[26] said by Stalker in the film, apparently for the benefit of the RUC eavesdroppers who were listening in.

[29] Chris Dunkely of the Financial Times said it was "the sort of programme that makes me want to stand up and cheer", calling it "admirable" and "remarkably even handed", with "splendid performances... and very superior camerawork and editing.

Mark Sanderson in Time Out noted the challenges the film makers had faced − a vast amount of information to convey, a huge number of real people to present with hardly any time to develop characterisation, an outcome that everybody knew − and considered that writer Michael Eaton had succeeded "triumphantly", using the tense and smoky style of a thriller to establish a nation under siege, "where the spools of the tape recorders never stop turning".

Sheridan Morley in The Times described "Stalker and Sir John Hermon of the RUC, two giants superbly played by Jack Shepherd and T. P. McKenna.

[4] Patrick Stoddart in the Sunday Times agreed: T. P. McKenna as Sir John Hermon had been "forceful", and the film-makers had been "wise" to demonstrate that they "understood the stresses facing members of the Royal Ulster Constabulary" and to "set the investigation against that backdrop".

[29] The Guardian's Hugo Young, writing a few months later, called the drama "a brilliant programme... seductively watchable, beautifully filmed, spaciously elaborate in its slow build-up of the characters and evidence on each side of the argument".

[9] Or as Hugh Hebert asked in The Guardian, when the film showed a battery genuinely stolen to lure the uniformed RUC men to their deaths, but Stalker's book said the call had been made by a farmer under duress, who is the viewer to believe?

Perhaps, as Hugo Young wrote, this was because "even the most sensational television programme is dependent on the print media for an afterlife, and the sensible politician understands that by far the most effective neutering tactic is simply not to complain".