Washing

A singer is the victim of a hit-and-run and Ho finds himself inside a case that is almost entirely Chinese, in a district the series had been circling since its first episode. The fifth of the six 1981 episodes is the run's most culturally specific hour and the one with the least English in it.

Fiesta Mei Ling plays Anna Wo, the singer the premise is built around, and around her are Fred Lee Own as Chung Ling, Kay Tong Lim as Scarface and Chua Kah Joo as Li Wo. Wikipedia also credits Phillip Tan as a Chinese villain and Frank Coda as Detective Sergeant Carrier; IMDb credits neither and instead has Eric Kent as Sergeant Ellerton. The two records disagree about the police part, which is recorded rather than resolved.

For a British series in 1981 to put a Chinese company in the principal guest parts, in a case conducted inside the Chinese community, is the practical version of the claim made for the programme. BFI's 2022 retrospective makes the point in structural terms: the prejudice in the series is directed at Ho's character rather than built into the writing of Chinese characters. This episode is where that decision is most visible, because there is almost nobody else on screen.

TVDB's account adds a second movement that appears nowhere else, that Ho goes into hospital to take care of a patient, which would put a suspect or a witness in his hands and invert the usual arrangement. It is a single-source detail and is recorded as one.

Tom Clegg directed this episode and the finale, the run's only pair of consecutive weeks with the same director, and the two together give the first series its closing shape: the community case in week five and the personal one in week six. Terence Williams produced, Ian Kennedy Martin wrote, Harry South's theme and Peter Chapman's photography are unchanged.

Robert Lee's Joe Ho and Larrington Walker's Ezra keep the character's two other worlds present, the family at the container plant and the street. Ho's conversation with his father, quoted by BFI Screenonline as taking place among steamed rice and Chinese tea in a restaurant, is the programme's equivalent of the sequence every detective series of the period gave its lead: a place to think out loud.

Yip's Ho is at his least isolated in this episode. The case is in the community he came from, and the series' interest is in the cost of being trusted in one place and not in the other.

The outcome is not documented in any source, and the episode is not available to view, so its plot is described here as a situation and nothing more. What the record supports is the casting, the case's position in the first series, and the fact that the run's most Chinese hour is also the one with the least on the page about what happened in it.