Secret State

Ho deals with a fatal shooting and discovers there is no corpse. The only witness is an old lady and her budgerigars, and soon other parties begin to take an interest in the case. The last episode of the series, and the best premise the second series produced.

A shooting without a body means either a death that did not happen or evidence that has been removed, and the run's two standard sources of pressure are both present: a witness whose reliability can be questioned, and an authority that arrives to take the case away. The second of those is the significant one. John Rolfe is credited as a Special Branch man, the only security-service character in fourteen episodes, in a series set in the Docklands in 1981 and 1982 whose detective otherwise never touches the intelligence world.

Anna Wing plays Alice Walden, the old lady with the birds. Patrick Malahide, who has a page on this site, plays Colin Bennett; Tony Caunter is Pollitt and Michael Robbins a caretaker. Paul Antrim returns as Chief Inspector Seddon after appearing in Oblomov, and Maurice O'Connell and Peter Spraggon appear as Loughlin and Charlie Miller. IMDb adds Oengus MacNamara as Liam Doyle and John Malcolm as Parker, neither of whom appears in Wikipedia's list.

The episode's theme is institutional reach, and it closes an argument the series had been making since its first hour. The run opened with Ho hunting a former detective chief inspector for what the police had done to his father; it ends with the security services removing a death from his hands. Both ends of the programme say the same thing about institutions and the people they tidy away.

Brian Lighthill directed his only episode of the run, and Terence Williams produced the fourteen and directed one of them. The finale was transmitted on 5 November 1982, a fortnight after the previous episode, and no source accounts for the skipped week. No third series was made and no source explains why; no interview with Ian Kennedy Martin or David Yip on the subject was located, so the run ends without a documented reason.

Yip's last episode as Ho gives him two obstacles rather than one and a case that changes hands, which is a fitting finish for a character defined by being on the wrong side of somebody's assumptions. Anna Wing's bird-keeping witness is the run's finest comic image, and the summary's decision to name the budgerigars tells the audience exactly what kind of scene it is.

IMDb records 7.8 from 6 votes. There is no audience data, no award record and no contemporary review of the ending, and the series' viewers column in Wikipedia is empty throughout.

The role the run leaves behind is documented, at least. BFI Screenonline carries the complete first episode and two clips, both series were released on DVD in a complete box set in April 2008, and the BFI's 2022 retrospective treats the series as the first British television drama to give a British East Asian actor a lead role. The finale itself, like every other episode here, has a premise in the record and an outcome in none.