True Commitment

The second series begins with a stabbing at a political march. A skinhead is dead, and a left-leaning protester is accused of killing him. Kavanagh defends the man.

The accused first says that it was entirely his fault. Then he hears that his upper-middle-class girlfriend has shopped him to the police, and he changes his story. He was only being chivalrous, he now says, and it was his girlfriend who did the stabbing.

TVDB's description of the film puts it from the opposite side. The daughter of a wealthy Jewish businessman and her boyfriend Mark, it says, plan to murder a member of the neo-Nazi opposition. They succeed in killing a 17-year-old skinhead at a demonstration, and when Mark is arrested he claims that the killing was an accident.

The two summaries disagree about who planned what, but they agree on the shape. The case is a question of whose account to believe once two lovers start to give evidence against one another, and Kavanagh has to find the answer as the defender of the one who has been betrayed.

Kavanagh's own relationship is under pressure as well. His wife Lizzie has been away, and their long-distance marriage begins to take its toll. Then he discovers that his daughter Kate, who is at Cambridge, is having an affair with her married tutor. The family strand and the case both turn on how much one person can trust another.

Adrian Hodges, who wrote two films in the first series, is the credited writer, and Andrew Grieve directed. David Schneider appears as Martin Haslam, and the cast includes Nicholas Day and Carmen Du Sautoy as Alan and Marcia Jacobs, Selina Cadell and Rob Edwards as Angela and Jeffery Manners, and Harriet Ashcroft as Kathy Tyler, as well as Oliver Ford Davies as the head of chambers Peter Foxcott, Anna Chancellor as Julia Piper, and Daisy Bates and Tom Brodie as Kate and Matt.

The film was shown on Monday 26 February 1996, after a gap of more than a year since the end of the first series. Central Television made it for ITV. The second series runs to six films, against four in the first.

IMDb voters give the film 7.7 out of 10.

The reviewer at the Classic Film and TV Café observed that the series' first three seasons mix Kavanagh's private life with his cases, and this film is a clear instance of it: the daughter's affair and the long-distance marriage are not footnotes but a second story told alongside the trial.

Neither Wikipedia nor TVDB states the verdict, so the account stops with the question of who held the knife still open.