The Tennis Racket

"The Tennis Racket" gives the fourth series a sports-celebrity story with a decent knot of emeralds inside it. Rory O'Brien, a tennis star who threw a cup of water over a line judge and got himself disqualified from the Grunstein Cup, arrives on Jersey for a charity exhibition match, financed by John McKennan, a sports-shop owner with Hungerford as a silent partner. Rory's brother Frankie, once a good player himself, is his coach — and, the episode slowly reveals, deep in debt to a London gangster who is now demanding the money back with interest.

Terry James' script, directed by Les Chatfield, is a proper thriller dressed as a celebrity story. Tony Anholt, a familiar television face of the era, plays Rory with the right blend of charm and selfishness; the tennis world — the promoter, the sponsor, the press — is sketched with economy. The mystery at the centre is an emerald robbery in London: McKennan bought the stolen stones, Frankie was sent to do the exchange and skimmed twenty thousand pounds to cover a bet he could not pay, and the emeralds are being smuggled to the island in tennis rackets.

The episode is at its best when it lets the sport and the crime share the screen. Bergerac, dragged to the reception by Susan, is annoyed to find McKennan treating him as Charlie's tame copper; the hit-and-run that forces Rory into a ditch, the brawl at the nightclub, and the old spinster Kate Fordham — who throws water over Rory in return, and turns out to live with a man called Green who was meant to buy the emeralds — all resolve into a single, crowded pattern. Suzanne Dando, a real television sports presenter, appears among the cast, lending the tennis world authenticity.

The finale has everyone in the same garden: the gangster's men holding Rory at gunpoint, Frankie throwing the emeralds over a hedge, McKennan stopped at the airport, and the racket that Hungerford drops revealing its hidden cargo. It is busy but it works, and the closing beat — Fordham arriving in time to see Rory arrested and offering to introduce Bergerac to Green — keeps the moral of the story simple: everyone was in it for themselves. A solid, entertaining hour that shows the fourth series could do celebrity crime with the machinery of a proper mystery.