Ice and Dust

The first series ends with Ho gambling his own life to accomplish his personal mission, and the mission is the reason he joined the police. Television Heaven records that Ho became an officer both to establish an identity outside his own community and to identify the former officer who had framed his father, a thread running through the first series; IMDb's cast record names that officer directly, with Allan Surtees credited as Ex-Detective Chief Inspector Marley-Harris.

The episode is therefore the point where the show's weekly format and its private story become the same thing. Ho has spent five weeks working cases assigned to him around a superior who dislikes his methods; in the sixth he spends the hour on an old wrong done by a police officer to his own family. The premise's phrase about gambling his own life is the only description any source gives of the risk he takes, and no source records the scene, the confrontation or what becomes of Marley-Harris.

The other half of the run's structure is present too. Michael Melia returns as Milner and Peter Dean as Greg, the two men Ho met in The Four from Fulham, so the series' criminal thread converges with its personal one in the same hour. Ian Hendry appears as Eddie Dwyer, Roger Sloman as Roger Horrabin, Peter Schofield as Detective Chief Inspector Maunsell and Paul Barber as Ned.

Tom Clegg directs for the second week running, the run's only consecutive pair by one director, and the two episodes he handles are the ones that carry the first series' shape. Terence Williams produced, Ian Kennedy Martin wrote every episode of 1981, and the production credits for this episode are complete on IMDb: Harry South's music, Peter Chapman's photography, Bill Wright's editing and Paul Munting's design.

The episode's title is a colloquialism for cheap gin rather than a description of the plot, and it is the only title in the run drawn from outside the case. It gives the finale a slightly raffish air that the material does not have, and it is a reminder that the series' voice was dry rather than solemn.

Yip's Ho is given the run's largest emotional assignment, and the episode is the reason the first series holds together as more than six cases. The man he is hunting is a former detective chief inspector, which is the series' sharpest idea about institutions: the damage to Ho's family was done by the force he joined.

What no source records is how the confrontation resolves, whether there is an arrest or a prosecution, or what Ho is left with afterwards. The second series opens in September 1982 with Marley-Harris credited again, which tells the audience that the first series' conclusion is not a burial, but nothing in the record explains the intervening months.

The episode is the most important hour of the run and the least documented. It is a 1981 BBC finale in which a Chinese detective's enemy is a former senior policeman, and it was written by the man who created both the series and The Sweeney.