The Squeeze

A heavy-duty Transit van carrying half a million pounds in used notes gets hijacked, drivers and all, and the job of finding it lands on SI10. The episode runs a straight line from there: the money is somewhere out in London, whoever took the van is out there with it, and the clock is ticking on both. A heavy-duty van full of cash can be anywhere in the city by the time the paperwork is done.

The better story is back at the office. Spikings wants Dempsey to hand over his gun, because carrying one is illegal for police officers in England, and Dempsey treats that law the way a New York cop would treat it, which is to say he treats it as someone else's problem. You watch him weigh the options: comply and look reasonable, or keep the hardware and look like himself. There was never any real doubt which way that goes. The two threads play off each other nicely: the hunt for the van gives the hour its engine, and the standoff over the firearm gives it its comedy, since Spikings is right and Dempsey knows he is right and neither man can give an inch. But the episode knows which argument is the funnier one, and it keeps coming back to it.

Jesse Carr-Martindale wrote it, Tony Wharmby directed. Michael Brandon's Dempsey does his best not to be domesticated while Glynis Barber's Makepeace watches from a sensible distance, and Ray Smith's Spikings does the heavy frowning. Around them the guest list is pure London stock: Robert Blythe, Colin Edwynn, Jonathan Stratt, Maureen Sweeney, James Beckett, Zig Byfield, John Moreno, JoAnne Good, Andy Bradford, Eddie Stacey and Roy Alon, with Michael Warburton's Boy on Bike pedalling through the mayhem.

It is a solid, workmanlike hour, and the gun argument is the bit you remember. Something tells you that particular argument is not over.