Armed and Extremely Dangerous

It opens the way the show means to go on: Lieutenant James Dempsey of the NYPD shoots his own partner. Joey was corrupt, and the shooting is justifiable, but it still needs explaining, and while the case is investigated Dempsey has to lie low. His superior O'Grady solves the problem by sending him to London under an officer exchange scheme. If you need to disappear for a while, a transatlantic secondment is a stylish way to do it.

Chief Superintendent Spikings, who runs SI10, is not pleased to inherit a yank. His quiet revenge is to couple the newcomer with Sergeant Makepeace, his complete opposite, an upper-class English rose, and point them both at a case about a mysterious shipment of caviar. But they are opposites the way a firecracker and a library are opposites, and that is rather the point. Dempsey's policing is loud and instinctive, pure New York. Makepeace's is careful and correct, and she is quietly unimpressed by most of it.

Ranald Graham wrote the episode and Tony Wharmby directed it, but the casting does the heavy lifting. Michael Brandon plays Dempsey as a man who has been plugged into the wrong socket and expects the socket to adjust. Glynis Barber's Makepeace watches him the way you watch someone who might be about to set fire to the furniture. Ray Smith's Spikings glowers through the middle of it, Terence Alexander's Commander Duffield hovers above, and the caviar case draws in Ralph Michael's Lord Winfield, Ray Jewers and Mark Wing-Davey among the rest. David Baxt's Joe, the partner Dempsey had to shoot, and Peter Ross-Murray's Eddie complete the ranks.

The shipment mystery is perfectly serviceable, but it is not what the hour is about. It is about two people who should not be in the same building learning to be in the same car, and trusting that friction to carry the story. It does, and the show never quite stopped trusting it.