A Family Affair

A Family Affair is built on a custody case that Kavanagh has already been part of. Michael Duggan, played by George Costigan, has been given an eight-month sentence for kidnapping his own son, and Kavanagh was his barrister. Now Duggan's ex-wife and her new husband are asking the court for an order that would ban all contact between him and the boy.

The case turns when Duggan tells his solicitor that the boy's stepfather is abusing him. TVDB describes the film from the barrister's side, saying that Kavanagh represents a determined father in a bitter custody battle, and then has to persuade the eager man not to take matters into his own hands, because he has learned of the earlier kidnappings. Duggan wants to act, and Kavanagh has to hold him back.

Kavanagh has a second case in the same film, and it is a different kind. He is prosecuting a pornographer, a woman whose defence is that her work is art. The two cases are not connected in the summaries, but they place the lawyer's role in contrast: in one he is the advocate for a father whose methods are wrong and whose cause may be right, and in the other he is the advocate for the state against someone who invokes a cultural defence.

At home he has to deal with the inevitable. His daughter Kate, played by Daisy Bates, wants her boyfriend to spend the night, and Kavanagh and his wife have to decide how to answer. In chambers, Jeremy Aldermarten, the pompous barrister played by Nicholas Jones, considers running for Parliament, and asks his junior colleague Julia Piper, played by Anna Chancellor, for a special favour.

Adrian Hodges wrote the film and Renny Rye directed. The cast includes Holly Aird as Judy Simmons, Michael Bertenshaw as Michael Barnard QC, Adrian Cairns as Judge Fairfax and Anna Chancellor, Daisy Bates and Tom Brodie in the regular roles. Robert Ashby appears as Detective Inspector Bryce.

It was shown on Tuesday 17 January 1995, the third film of the first series. The reviewer at Classic Film and TV Cafe, writing about the series in 2019, noted that the first three series mix Kavanagh's private life with his cases, and this film is typical of that, with its daughter's boyfriend and its chambers politics running beside the courtroom stories.

IMDb voters give the film 7.8 out of 10.

The sources read do not report whether the court granted the order, or how the pornography prosecution ended, so the account leaves both open.