Extreme Prejudice

Shipments of army weapons are being hit in a systematic pattern, and the trail should run through an ex-army man called Jimmy, named by an eyewitness. But the superior in charge, Edwards, insists the pair go after a dimwitted strongman called Big Ben Davis instead. When the boss points you away from the obvious lead, you follow, and you spend the rest of the episode wondering why.

Jeffrey Caine wrote it, John Hough directed. Clive Mantle, years before he played Little John for the BBC, makes Big Ben Davis a proper mountain of a man, and Stephan Chase's Edwards does the officious superior bit well. James Gaddas's Andy and Kenneth Gilbert's Dr. Swann fill in the investigation, and the undercover thread has Dempsey and Makepeace posing as Middle East terrorists to reach the arms dealer supplying terrorist groups in Britain. Lea Rochelle and Marc Boyle get the unenviable roles of the terrorist couple. It first went out on 27 September 1986, and the guest list runs wider still, with Mark Ryan, Roy Boyd, Wayne Michaels, Simon Crane, Linzi Drew and Terence Plummer filling out the frame.

The episode asks a question the show liked to ask: what happens when the people above you are wrong, and you have to choose between orders and instinct. The answer, as ever, is that Dempsey and Makepeace follow the evidence and let the politics sort itself out afterwards. The show had a habit of letting its heroes be right when the hierarchy was wrong, and this hour does it with particular confidence.

It is a brisk, efficient hour, and Big Ben Davis is the sort of name the eighties produced without trying. There is a pleasing bluntness to the whole hour, right down to a title that states its verdict in two words. The villain is not the clever one, which is the point: the clever ones are the ones giving the orders, and they are the harder target.