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After a young detective (Del Baker) is murdered while doing some investigating on his own on crime kingpin Mallory's gang, Detective Inspector Regan (John Thaw) wants to investigate - but is prevented by bureaucracy because this is a case for the Serious Crime unit under Detective Inspector Laker (Stephen Yardley), which has been on Mallory's case for years. And apart from that, Regan is an old school lone wolf cop, which doesn't ring well with top brass anymore. Regan though isn't likely to forgive the murder of one of their own, so he starts investigating on his own and pretty much forces his partner Carter (Dennis Waterman).

Now the story behind the murder: Crime kingpin Mallory was in a turf war with fellow kingpin Tusser (David Daker), and while the latter went to jail, the former made a getaway to Spain. But now that Tusser is about to be released from prison, it's said that Mallory will return to London with a fake passport. So Regan and Carter question pretty much everyone who might know about Mallory's return, and eventually come to the conclusion that Mallory might have never left - and eventually they get a clue leading to Mallory's country cottage ... where they find his belongings, apparently untouched for a while, and not the man himself - which suggests that he might be dead, and it was probably his own gang who offed him as his second-in-command Dale (Lee Montague) might have gotten a better deal from Tusser than from his boss. And with that knowledge, Regan poses as a blackmailer and this way lures Dale out into the open and makes the arrest - while Serious Crime is only starting to piece the puzzle together ...

A rather cool piece of British cop TV that takes a more blue collar approach to the genre to similar shows and shows more of the gritty side of the business, where there are no real heroes or villains, and thus the show's protagonist doesn't always play fair, as he fights bureaucracy almost as much as he fights crime. The concept really caught on with audiences and this episode of Armchair Cinema was soon spun off into the series The Sweeney, which ran from 1975 to 1978 and saw two feature film spin-offs of its own.

In all a pretty cool walk down memory lane.

review © by Mike Haberfelner

 

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