Regan

Regan started life as a one-off television play, an Armchair Cinema special that was really a series pilot wearing a disguise. The engine is a death. Alan Cowley, a Flying Squad sergeant, is led a merry dance by the gangsters of a London pub, survives a brutal beating, and then dies anyway, which somehow reads as worse. It comes out that he hadn't called in for days and had filed no paperwork at all. His guvnor, Jack Regan, wants the men responsible, but the case has gone to the rival Serious Flying Squad, and Regan has been told to keep his nose out.

The instruction doesn't survive long. Regan goes after the killers anyway, working around the official investigation and the warnings from above, and the drama comes out of that collision: proper procedure versus a man who has decided procedure can wait. There's real affection in the way John Thaw plays it, the shrugged shoulders and the sideways grin, the willingness to bend a rule until it snaps.

Ian Kennedy Martin and Trevor Preston wrote it, and Tom Clegg directed. Thaw is Regan, with Dennis Waterman's George Carter already at his side. Lee Montague plays Arthur Dale, Garfield Morgan is Frank Haskins, and the support runs from David Daker's Tusser and Janet Key's Kate Regan to Maureen Lipman as Annie, with Morris Perry, Stephen Yardley and Barry Jackson completing the ranks.

What carries it is the plainness. No glamour. A pub, a beating, paperwork not filed, a copper who won't let it go. But the pilot gives you the whole show in miniature, the partnership and the grudges, the sense that the law in London in 1974 was a rough trade. Regan breaks the rules because someone has to, and the play is honest enough to leave you wondering whether that's admirable or just inevitable.