The Homecoming

An armed operation on a London council estate goes wrong before the opening titles are done. Detective Sergeant Freddie Spender and his partner Colin Driver are working under cover when armed men confront them, and Driver is shot and left seriously injured. With the job blown and a wounded officer on his hands, Spender is taken off the ground and sent to the one place he has spent fifteen years avoiding: Newcastle upon Tyne. He travels north by train and arrives at Central Station with nothing to do but work out what he has been handed.

The posting is not really a posting. Superintendent Yelland runs an operation the local force knows nothing about, and he wants a man with local knowledge who is not known in the city. Spender is given Raymond Price, a local businessman, and told to gather evidence and go back to London. Detective Sergeant Dan Boyd, desk-bound and bored, is installed as the go-between who carries instructions and keeps the two men apart. Almost every meeting Spender has with his own superior happens in a car park or a back room, because to be seen with Yelland would be to stop existing as an undercover officer.

What makes the episode more than a setup is what Spender finds when he gets home. His ex-wife Frances lives in Jesmond with their daughters Kate and Laura, and he starts taking the girls out around the region again. His oldest friend is Kenneth Norman Oakley, known to everyone as Stick, a builder turned burglar with time behind him and contacts Spender cannot get any other way. The show's real arrangement is here in the first hour: a policeman whose usefulness depends entirely on a criminal, and a family he can see but not quite rejoin.

Jimmy Nail built Spender against the part that made him. He had been Oz, and the new character is quieter, better dressed and markedly softer underneath. He wrote the scripts as well as playing the lead, and the shaping shows. Sammy Johnson, as Stick, is the more natural presence of the two, and the friendship needs no explaining. The partnership works because neither man apologises for what he is. Paul Greenwood's Yelland is not a fool and not a villain; he simply has no time for his own officer, and his judgements are often reasonable even when his manner is not.

What the episode does best is open on failure rather than on a crime. The audience meets Spender after an operation has already collapsed and in a city he does not want, and the assignment is the thinnest thing in the hour. Watching it now, the pleasure is in the introductions and in the Get Carter homage of the northbound train and the station platform. It ends with Spender dragging his man to a waiting train at Central Station, a first confrontation staged where the story started. Yelland then tells him he is staying. The one-off job becomes the series.