Ringer

Ringer opens with one of those small disasters that derail everything. Regan's car gets nicked, and in it sit the surveillance photographs from a stakeout on the gangster Frankie Kemble. The car is the least of it. The photos make their way straight to Kemble, and weeks of watching and waiting are handed over in one afternoon. The planned takedown stops being a plan at all and turns into a race.

The episode has a lovely nasty logic to it. Nothing Kemble does is clever, because nothing has to be. A bit of petty theft does the work that all his muscle couldn't. Regan and Carter are left chasing their own evidence, and the tension comes from watching men who are used to being ahead suddenly running to catch up. Police work hangs on details, a locked car or a careless moment, and one of those details has just walked off in somebody's pocket. The sting collapses under its own weight, and the only villain who has done anything clever is a car thief who didn't know what he was carrying.

Trevor Preston and Ian Kennedy Martin wrote it, Terry Green directed. Brian Blessed makes a magnificent Frank Kemble, all bluster and menace, and Ian Hendry's Dave Brooker is the sort of man you'd cross the street to avoid. John Thaw and Dennis Waterman carry the centre as Regan and Carter, with Garfield Morgan's Haskins, Jill Townsend as Jenny Peters and Colin Douglas as the Commander in support, alongside Alan Lake, June Brown and Toni Palmer. It's an ensemble that feels like a proper nick, full of people who'd rather be somewhere else.

It's a small story told well. The car theft is almost banal, which is the point: crime doesn't need to be clever to be effective, it just needs one loose thread. But watching Regan and Carter run after their own evidence is most of the fun.