Chorale

Jack Balfe, a well-known East End fence, wants the tenor Robert Tear to sing at his daughter's birthday party, and nobody, least of all Ho, is going to stop him. The sixth episode of the second series is the most enjoyable premise in the run and the only one with a real performer playing himself inside the fiction.

Robert Tear is credited as Self, which makes him the single instance in fourteen episodes of a genuine artist appearing as himself in a BBC police drama. George Baker, who has a page on this site, plays the fence; Derren Nesbitt plays Gunther Esslin, and Lindsey Walker is credited by IMDb as Betty Balfe, the daughter whose birthday is the occasion. Roy Pattison and Roy Scammell play two German characters, Valentine Palmer and Peter Craze an SDP candidate and an SDP agent, and Reg Woods a sergeant.

The SDP detail is unusually precise for a series this loosely documented. The Social Democratic Party had been founded in 1981 and was contesting by-elections through 1982, so the episode puts a live political organisation into a Limehouse story as background rather than as subject. For a viewer interested in what London looked like in the autumn of 1982, this hour is the run's most datable.

The collision is the point. A criminal who wants a recital, a real tenor, German guests and a political agent in the same hour is Limehouse at its most socially mixed, and the series' interest in who gets to belong where is present in a lighter form than usual. The title's joke, a chorale sung at a fence's party, is the show's driest.

Jeremy Summers directed his only episode of the run. He had worked in British television and film since the 1950s, and the episode's guest casting suggests a director comfortable with high-culture and variety names, though no source comments on the choice. Terence Williams produced, Ian Kennedy Martin wrote, Harry South's theme and Bill Wright's editing are as usual.

Yip's Ho is positioned in the premise as the man who might intervene and, in the summary's joke, will not. That is the second series' comic manner in a sentence: the detective is the straight man in a story about somebody else's arrangements.

IMDb records 7.6 from 5 votes, which is the run's median figure and rests on five votes. No contemporary review and no audience figure were located for any episode of this series.

What the record does not contain is what happens to Balfe, whether the performance takes place, or how Ho's week resolves. Those are unrecoverable and are not invented here.

The episode earns its place by casting: George Baker as a fence with cultural ambitions, a leading British tenor as himself, and a set of German and SDP parts that no other British police series of the period was assembling in one hour.