The Four from Fulham

A gang from Fulham arrives in Limehouse looking for something Mr Hong has, and Ho watches them all and sees ambition and greed do their work. The third episode of the series completes the two-week story begun the previous Friday and introduces the two men Ho is still dealing with in the final episode of the first series.

The title is a geography joke as much as a description. Four men from west London are working an East End opportunity, and the boundary between the two does the work of a border. Vincent Wong returns as Mr Hong, with Helen Keating, Brian Croucher, Matthew Scurfield and John Judd all continuing from the previous episode, and James Marcus back as Charlie. Michael Melia plays Milner and Peter Dean plays Greg, both of whom return in Ice and Dust three weeks later; Anthony Heaton plays Hartley, and Albert Moses plays Mr Banerjee.

That continuity is the episode's structural importance. It is one of only two points in the first series where guest characters carry across weeks, and the villains introduced here are the ones Ho is still chasing in the finale. The first series is often described as six self-contained cases; the record shows a criminal thread running underneath them.

The directing credit is the run's one unresolved disagreement. Wikipedia gives this episode to Ian Toynton, who directed three of the six 1981 episodes; IMDb gives it to Terry Green, who directed the previous week. Both names are used with confidence elsewhere in the credits and the conflict cannot be settled from the sources.

Limehouse provides the locations, and the episode has the densest street detail of the first year: an eel and pie shop stands alongside the club as a place where police and criminals use the same premises. That kind of ordinary working business, used as a meeting point rather than as a set piece, is what BFI Screenonline has in mind when it describes the series as steeped in the language and atmosphere of its East End locations.

Ian Kennedy Martin wrote it, Terence Williams produced it, Peter Chapman photographed it and Harry South's theme opens as always. The production team did not change across the run, which is why the two years look and sound like one series even though the transmission night and much of the cast changed.

Yip's Ho is placed at the edge of the story rather than at its centre, observing a dispute between criminals rather than driving it. The episode is the series' clearest statement that its detective's advantage is knowledge of who belongs where, and that his disadvantage is that both sides know exactly where he belongs.

The record stops at the premise, as it does for every episode of this run: the outcome of the fight for Mr Hong's position is not documented anywhere and is not invented here. What remains is the shape of the thing, a district boundary, four men from the wrong side of London, and an eel and pie shop in the middle of it.