The Best of Both Worlds

Pie in the Sky begins with a deal. Detective Inspector Henry Crabbe, a senior officer who has spent his working life wishing he were cooking instead, finally retires and opens a restaurant. On the eve of the launch he is arrested for the murder of a criminal named Dudley Hooperman. The charge does not survive, but Assistant Chief Constable Freddy Fisher makes sure the arrest has consequences: Crabbe is told he can keep his restaurant, and his pension, on the condition that he stays on the force and takes the cases Fisher sends him. The restaurant at Middleton opens its doors with its owner still a serving policeman.

The restaurant's first week brings its own problem. The head chef Crabbe hires will not cook steak and kidney pie, on the grounds that it is beneath a kitchen of the standard he intends to run. Crabbe, whose whole position on food is that good cooking is honest cooking rather than fashionable cooking, dismisses him and does the job himself. It is the first of many statements the series makes about what it values, and it is made before the first case is fully under way.

That case concerns the death of a caterer. Crabbe, working with WPC Sophia Cambridge and against the background of Fisher's new arrangement, has to investigate a killing inside the trade he has just joined. Margaret Crabbe, an accountant by training, is appalled at the costs her husband is running up and the absence of any plan for profit, and the marriage's running argument about whether the restaurant can survive is established in the same episodes as the blackmail that keeps him in the police.

The solution turns on the kitchen rather than the police station. Crabbe's knowledge of food and of how a kitchen works is what allows him to see what the official investigation misses, and the case closes because a man who cooks understands something the officers around him do not. The arrangement at the end of the episode is the arrangement the series lives in for four more years: Hooperman's death has not freed him, Fisher's hold is intact, and the restaurant is open.

The premiere sets out the programme's whole method in one go. The crime is small by the standards of the genre, the violence is off-screen, and the detective is defined by his reluctance rather than by his appetite for the job. Crabbe's attempt to leave policing was serious, and the fact that it failed is the reason the series exists.