Heartland

Heartland puts Kavanagh on the other side of the court. In most of the series he defends, but here he is asked to prosecute. The defendant is a former police officer whose car hit a teenager in Sunderland and left the boy with serious brain damage.

The boy's mother does not think it was an accident. She believes that the ex-policeman has become a vigilante, and that he was aiming to kill. TVDB's description supports this reading of the man, calling him an ex-police officer turned vigilante. The mother appeals to Kavanagh to take the case, and Wikipedia says that she persuades him even though there is not enough evidence to bring a charge that will stick.

As a rule the series shows Kavanagh defending a client who looks certain to be convicted until a twist in the case, and prosecuting only occasionally. This film is one of the exceptions.

He finds that there is more to the case than meets the eye. In the course of it he sets out to prove that the police are not always on the right side of the law. That line is the key to the premise. The defendant has served in the force, and the case brings out the way in which the people who enforce the law can also break it.

Russell Lewis wrote the film, as he had the opening one, and Colin Gregg directed it again. The cast includes Mark Benton, who plays Sergeant Redbridge, as well as Anna Chancellor as Kavanagh's junior Julia Piper, Daisy Bates and Tom Brodie as his children, and John Thaw in the lead. Chancellor's lively junior was singled out by The Spectator's columnist as an engaging foil to Thaw's gruffness.

For viewers who knew John Thaw only as Inspector Morse, the Classic Film and TV Café reviewer wrote years later, Kavanagh is a different proposition: an outgoing family man and a passionate barrister, where Morse was an introvert with few friends. His chambers, River Court, are run by the head of chambers Peter Foxcott, played by Oliver Ford Davies, and the chief clerk Tom Buckley, played by Cliff Parisi, who assigns the cases.

The film was shown on Tuesday 10 January 1995, the second of the four films in the first series. It was made by Central Television for ITV, and IMDb voters give it 8.1 out of 10, higher than the opener.

Wikipedia's summary and TVDB's description both stop at the setting-up of the case. They do not say how it ends, whether Kavanagh gets his conviction, or what the explanation of the incident turns out to be, so this account stops there too.