Trials

The second series opens on the first day of a trial at the Old Bailey, with Ho dealing with a pair of pensioners, a twelve-bore shotgun and a fleet of three-wheeled cars. After a first series that ended with its detective gambling his own life on a private vendetta, the show comes back fifteen months later in a markedly lighter mood.

The comic furniture is period-specific and deliberate: a shotgun, Reliant three-wheelers and elderly offenders, arranged around a court case running in the background. Maurice Denham, one of the most distinctive character actors of the period, plays Edward Ruthven; Frank Gatliff is defending counsel and John Kidd the judge, so the Old Bailey side of the hour is cast with the weight the institution deserves. Nat Jackley appears as Rex Madden, with Neil Hallett as Mr Fisher.

Two structural things happen in this episode. The first is that Richard Rees joins as Dr David Li, the only addition to the regular cast between the two series, and the show gains a doctor among its recurring parts. The second is that Allan Surtees returns as Ex-Detective Chief Inspector Marley-Harris, the officer who framed Ho's father, which tells the audience in the first ten minutes of the new series that the old business is not finished.

Ian Toynton directed the opening episode of both series, and his four episodes across the run are the most by any director. That continuity of approach matters more than it sounds: the show moved from Thursday to Friday and from 1981 to 1982, and the look, the theme and the production team stayed exactly where they were. Terence Williams produced all fourteen episodes, Harry South wrote the music, Peter Chapman photographed the series and Bill Wright cut most of it.

Yip's Ho is given comedy here that the first series used sparingly, and he plays it as the straight man: the objects and the pensioners are funny, the detective is not. It is a different use of the character from the maverick energy of 1981, and it is where the second series' looser tone begins.

The court is the episode's other institution. A trial is the state's version of the events Ho investigates, and putting one on screen alongside a week of police work gives the show a second authority to measure itself against. The series had been about a district; here it is briefly about the machinery that disposes of what the district produces.

As with every episode of this run, no source records how the case resolves, and nothing is invented here to fill the gap. The episode's interest is in the reset: a series returning after more than a year, reopening its oldest wound and introducing its only new regular in the same hour.