Release

The series opens with a released prisoner, a smashed window and a terrified wife, and by the end of the hour its detective has worked out that past crimes breed present violence. It is a conventional premise for a police drama of 1981, and what made it unusual was the man doing the working out.

David Yip plays Detective Sergeant John Ho, and his casting made him the first British East Asian lead in a British television drama. The programme puts him in Limehouse, in London's Docklands, among a Chinese community that distrusts him for wearing the uniform and a police force that regards him as an exotic. The series' title promises an ethnic premise; what it delivers is a detective who is fully at home in the East End and treated as a foreigner in it.

The episode's case is built around Alan Ford as Jack Arthur Bross, the released prisoner of the premise, who returns in the second series as Ho's informer. That is worth knowing at the start: Bross is the run's most durable guest character in either year, and his introduction here as a man just out of prison is the beginning of a working relationship that 1982 will use as a plot engine.

Around him are Shirley Stelfox as Arlene, P.H. Moriarty as Rose, Ahmed Khalil as Jamshid Kamal and Jack Le White as Old Harry Rose, with Dorothy White as Daria Lejeune.

Ian Kennedy Martin created the series and wrote this episode. He had devised The Sweeney and Juliet Bravo, and the format he brought here is the same maverick pattern with a different centre of gravity: an unorthodox detective, a superior who dislikes his methods, and an informant network doing more work than the laboratory.

The look is location-shot East End and Docklands in the last years before redevelopment. BFI Screenonline describes the show as steeped in the atmosphere and language of its East End locations, and notes that when the violence comes it is sharp rather than sustained. Harry South's theme, written by the composer of The Sweeney's, opens each week.

Derek Martin's Detective Chief Inspector Berwick establishes the friction that will run for two years, and John Bott's Chief Superintendent Halsey and Arthur Kelly's Chegwyn put a station around the two of them. Robert Lee's Joe Ho, the detective's father, gives the character a second home at the shipping container plant where he works.

This is also the easiest episode of the run to see. BFI Screenonline hosts it in full, at around forty-nine minutes, with two clips alongside. For a series with no repeat history and a single DVD release, that makes the first hour the practical entry point.

What the sources do not record is how the case ends. The premise is documented everywhere and the resolution nowhere, and no account of it is invented here. What can be said is that the opening hour does the job a first episode has to do in a series with a premise this particular: it establishes a detective who belongs to two communities and is fully trusted by neither, and it does so without turning him into a curiosity.