Briefs Trooping Gaily

Briefs Trooping Gaily gives Kavanagh a client who will not help herself. He is still mourning his wife's death, and he has to defend a woman charged with killing her abusive husband. Wikipedia says she has a good case for manslaughter, but she seems determined to plead guilty to murder.

TVDB gives her side of the story. She admits killing her husband for repeatedly beating her, and Kavanagh urges her not to admit it in court. Barrister and client are therefore at odds over something basic, the plea, and the film is about whether he can persuade her.

In chambers there is a comic sub-plot, as there usually is. Jeremy Aldermarten is torn between the demands of his lead role in a Gilbert and Sullivan production and a charge of professional misconduct for looking at a defence brief. The cast includes a Gilbert and Sullivan choir. Nicholas Jones plays Aldermarten.

TVDB says a colleague asks Kavanagh to represent him before the Conduct Committee when he is accused of looking at the wrong brief, which suggests that Kavanagh becomes involved in the misconduct case as well as the murder trial.

Charles Wood wrote the film, his second of the series after Mute of Malice, and Peter Smith directed. Rebecca Front appears as Cathy Winslow, Angela Down as Angela Beddoes and George Harris as Mr Justice Fayne, with the Grosvenor Light Opera Company and John Davis as an opera director, and Oliver Ford Davies, Valerie Edmond and the Kavanagh children in the regular parts.

From the fourth series, the Classic Film and TV Café reviewer notes, the show concentrates on Kavanagh's work in court as defence counsel and prosecutor, which suits a film built around a plea. Wikipedia observes that the comedy in the sub-plots comes from the pomposity and self-absorption of Jeremy, a posh barrister in chambers, and this film gives him a stage on which to be both.

On the DVD release it completes the first disc of the fourth series. The film was shown on Tuesday 31 March 1998, the third of the six in the fourth series. Central Television made it for ITV. IMDb voters give it 8.2 out of 10.

Wikipedia describes the series' cases as often carrying a subtext of racism, sexism or other prejudice, and says that Kavanagh will not stand for injustice.

The sources do not say whether Kavanagh persuades the woman, what her plea was or how the misconduct charge ends, so the account does not either.