Guess Who’s Coming to Pinner

Charlie Johnson's funeral is a full-dress occasion, and the police watch it the way you watch a fire you expect to spread. The Johnson home in Pinner is bugged, which makes the wake a strange mix of mourning and surveillance. Tommy Hambury, a major crook back after years abroad, is spotted in the crowd, and the police start working out what grand plan might be forming.

Arthur, meanwhile, has accepted a drink. Then another. The merry widow, Ron Johnson, takes a shine to him, and somewhere in the fog Arthur has a conversation with Hambury that he is sure is important, though he cannot remember a word of it. He takes desperate steps to find the man again. The police, watching all this, decide Arthur must be trying to take over Charlie's empire, and give chase. For once the law is after Arthur for a crime he has not committed and does not even know about.

Ray has his own trouble. He starts seeing Joanna, a friend of the family, who turns out to be an undercover police officer. That is the sort of romantic luck Ray has come to expect.

Michael Gambon makes a fine Hambury, all menace and charm in roughly equal measure. Susan Tracy is the widow, John Rowe is Superintendent Copeland, Dorian Healy is D.S. Cody and Gina McKee is the unlucky Joanna. Glynn Edwards, Nicholas Day and Stephen Tompkinson do their usual reliable work. David Yallop and Leon Griffiths wrote it; Diarmuid Lawrence directed.

It is a big, busy episode, and it works because everyone in it is playing a different game. Arthur is playing 'I have no idea what happened'. For once he is telling the truth.

But the episode belongs to the hangover. Watching a man try to reconstruct a conversation he should never have had is comedy of the slowest, most painful kind, and Cole plays it beautifully.