The Greenhorn

A detective sergeant leaves the Metropolitan Police for a county force and finds, on his first day, that the countryside has its own way of killing people. Rockliffe's Folly opens with Alan Rockliffe nearly running a woman over on a country road, and the woman, Hannah Grierson, turns out to have a dead husband upstairs. The post-mortem says pesticide, and the pesticide is not one the farm uses. Mrs Grierson's answer is that the family on the neighbouring land poisoned it.

That is the situation, and it is a good one for a series that has changed its ground. The London Rockliffe of the earlier runs chased armed robbers and drug dealers through a city whose violence was public. In Wessex the crime comes out of land, inheritance and who farms what, and the police have to work out whether a death is a dispute between neighbours or something else.

The episode's whole first act is built on that uncertainty, and it ends with the accusation hanging in the air between two families who will still be sharing a parish boundary afterwards.

Around Rockliffe the show introduces a new office in one hour. Ian Brimble's Inspector Leslie Yaxley is the senior officer, James Aubrey's DI Derek Hoskins the detective above him, and the uniformed side arrives as a body of constables and sergeants who will carry the series for the next six weeks. Between them they give the run a county atmosphere that the earlier episodes had no reason to build.

The title is the episode's joke. A greenhorn is a novice, and the novice in question is the experienced man: the locals treat the incoming Metropolitan sergeant as the one who does not know how things are done, and the case is designed to show them otherwise. It is a canny way of starting a seventh series of a character, and it means the episode does not have to pretend the audience has forgotten him.

Diarmuid Lawrence directed, and he had directed an episode of the previous run, so the transfer was handled by someone who knew what the character was before he moved. Susannah Hagan wrote it, and she also wrote the final episode, which gives the run bookends from one writer and a shape that runs from a farm to a property deal.

What cannot be said about this hour, or about any of the seven, is how it ends. The archive for this run is a truncated paragraph on a database, a single line on Wikipedia, a cast list and a transmission date. There is no repeat, no DVD and no recoverable press.

The episode is therefore described here as it opens and not as it closes, and the honest account of a series this thinly documented is that its setups are recoverable and its resolutions are not. What is recoverable is good: a county-force opening that takes its lead seriously and gives him a case the old show could never have told.