Winds of Change

The first episode of Bulman's own series finds him somewhere he never quite expected to be: behind a shop counter with a jeweller's loupe, repairing clocks. Retirement agreed with him, on paper. Then a murder lands in his lap, and the daughter of an old colleague turns up as his new business partner, and the quiet life starts leaking at the seams.

But the case itself stays a little vague around the edges. Bulman is asked to help out, his fresh start shadowed by killing, and the episode earns its keep by showing him the exits from that shop rather than by the neatness of the plot. Every familiar face from his police past drifts through at some point: DI Holmes, DCS Jack Lambie, DS Mackay, DS Derek Willis, DCI Faulkner. Retirement, it turns out, is a small world with a long reach, and the old firm has not finished with him.

Murray Smith wrote it and William Brayne directed. Don Henderson gives Bulman the slow, patient authority of a man who has seen everything and is mildly tired of it, while Siobhan Redmond's Lucy McGinty is sharp enough to keep pace without being allowed to outrun him. Their double act is the engine of the series, and it starts here with both parties slightly suspicious of the arrangement, which is the right note. John Benfield, Mark McManus, Simon Molloy, Dennis Blanch and Jeremy Gagan fill out the ranks of the old firm. McManus is worth a second glance, since most viewers will know him better as Taggart.

It is a gentle opener rather than a spectacular one. That suits a man easing himself back into work he never quite left, and the clock shop works as a promise: whatever this show is about, it is partly about a man who wanted out and cannot manage it. That tension carries the episode further than the mystery itself. The murder gets solved, and the retirement carries on being a work in progress.