Income Tax

An ex-villain wants to put his dishonest ways behind him and is not pleased to be reminded of his past by the tax man and by John Ho. The fourth episode of the first series moves the show's attention from gangland to money, and it is the first episode in which the central case has nothing to do with being Chinese.

Lee Montague plays Reg Purnell, the retired criminal, and the episode's interest is in which of the two agencies asking him questions he resembles more. On one side is the Inland Revenue, which does not accept that a man's earnings have stopped being interesting; on the other is Ho, who has reasons of his own. A reformed criminal caught between two arms of the state is a better arrangement than a chase, and the series gets a genuinely different hour out of it.

The guest cast widens the episode's London. Nicholas McArdle plays David Melvyn and Jacob Witkin plays Mr Shamal, while Marc Zuber plays Sheik Ahmed Mahmoud and Ishia Bennison a consulate receptionist, which puts Gulf money into a 1981 police case as ordinary detail rather than as a novelty. Renu Setna plays Mr Patel, a character name Albert Moses also carries elsewhere in the run, and Kenneth Gilbert plays Sergeant Porritt, with Bill Treacher as a bus driver and Dicken Ashworth as a large man. IMDb adds Mark Buffery as a car salesman.

Ian Toynton directed, one of three episodes he handled in 1981 and the most by any director that year. Terence Williams produced, Ian Kennedy Martin wrote, Harry South's music and Peter Chapman's photography are present as always, and the production values are the same as the surrounding weeks, which is part of why the series reads as a single body of work rather than a set of one-offs.

The episode matters to the run's shape because of what it leaves out. Ho is still the detective, the prejudice he meets is still there in the way he is received, and the story is about an English criminal and the Revenue. A series called The Chinese Detective that spends its fourth hour on tax is a series that treated its premise as a position to write from rather than a subject to keep announcing.

There is no violence in the premise at all, which is unusual for the period's police drama and typical of the second year more than the first. The title is the theme: the tax man is the other detective, and the question is whether a man can ever be finished with his past.

Yip's Ho is given the episode's quietest work, asking questions in offices rather than on the street, and Lee Montague's Purnell is the sort of guest part the series used well: a competent adult whose decision to stop being a criminal is the interesting fact about him.

As with the rest of the run, no source records how the case ends, and nothing is invented here to fill the space. What the episode demonstrates is the width of the series' interests inside a single district.