Unfrocked in Babylon

Ma Kane and her son Danny run Rotherhithe from behind the front of the Paradise Club, a local music venue where the takings and the drinks list have more in common than the licensing laws would like. Danny is at war with his neighbour Peter Noonan, and the feud has been simmering for long enough that both sides have stopped remembering the original grievance. Then Ma dies, and her brother Frank, a priest, becomes co-owner of the club.

That is the whole idea in one sentence, and it works. Frank arrives with a dog collar and a vocation and finds himself holding half of a family firm that runs on favours and short fuses. Ma ran the place on her own rules, and nobody has quite worked out who enforces them now. The club is the same; the man in the office has changed. Danny, who has done the business all his life, now has to share the floor with a brother who blesses things.

The casting sells it. Leslie Grantham was fresh from playing the most talked-about villain on television, and Don Henderson had spent years as the spymaster on ITV's The Professionals. Putting the two of them behind the same bar gives the club a strange kind of weight.

The neighbourhood is sketched in quickly. DI Rosy Campbell keeps a close watch with DS Tommy Cooper and DC Webster on the police side, while Noonan's crew, Polish Joe and Ginger among them, orbit the trouble like moths.

Murray Smith wrote it, Lawrence Gordon Clark directed. Don Henderson's Frank and Leslie Grantham's Danny head the cast, with Barbara Wilshere's Carol, Kitty Aldridge's Rosy Campbell, Philip Martin Brown's Noonan, Malcolm Raeburn's Tommy Cooper, Ben Daniels's Webster, Leon Herbert's Polish Joe, Jack Ellis's Ginger and Peter Gunn's Eddie Cleary filling out the street.

As introductions go, this one is efficient. The comedy-caper tone is there from the off, and the two brothers make an odd enough pairing to carry it. The show is asking you to trust a priest and a gangster sharing an office, and on this evidence it is a fair bet. And the church and the club never look like sitting quietly together, which is exactly the point.