The Conference

The Seven Dials team swaps the streets for a seminar hall when a spate of hotel thefts is picked over at a crime conference. It's the sort of occasion built for theory: lecture notes and polite disagreement, with plenty of coffee. But the team is not built for theory. When the new boy, Detective Inspector Jack Slater, decides to set up DS Phillips as a bit of a joke, the joke goes off in a way nobody planned, and the seminar stops being academic rather suddenly.

The conference is supposed to be about the hotel break-ins, and it is, right up until Slater's stunt turns the gathering into a working case. What starts as observation becomes participation, and the unit's full range of skills gets exercised whether the syllabus allows it or not. Maggie Forbes is in her usual form, watching the new man's confidence and waiting for it to meet reality. The hotel thefts themselves recede into the background, and the seminar ends up teaching the team something about themselves instead.

There is real pleasure in watching a procedural take its characters out of the office and find them exactly the same. Put them in suits in a conference room and they still solve things the way they always do, by getting involved. The bang, when it comes, is not the one Slater ordered.

Tony Hoare and Terence Feely wrote it, with Gerry Mill directing. Jill Gascoine leads as Maggie, William Marlowe is Chief Inspector Russell, Paul Moriarty plays Jake Barratt and Kevin O'Shea is Peter Phillips. Michael Graham Cox's Slater sets the trouble in motion, with Gwyneth Powell as Detective Inspector Mary Woods, John Horsley as ex-Commander Dan Mason, Shaun Curry as Detective Inspector Williams, Sean Scanlan as Chief Inspector MacFarlain and Ann Bruce as Selina.

A modest episode, but a cheerful one, and the seminar scenes are worth the price of admission on their own.