Messenger Of The Gods

Series four opens with Regan nursing a hangover and pulling Lukey Sparrow in for the theft of thirty thousand pounds' worth of mercury. Lukey is a local Lothario, and his alibi is a strong one: he was in bed with a married woman when the job went down. The catch is the wedding. He is due to marry Linda Rix the next day, so the alibi has to stay quiet, or the bride's mother will make the mercury look like small change.

Lily Rix is that mother, and Diana Dors plays her with full battle honours. The running joke of the episode is that Regan, who has faced down armed men, ends up dreading a woman more than any of them. Dors gives her the slow-burning menace of someone who has been underestimated all her life and is done with it. Malcolm McFee's Lukey is a wide boy in over his head, and Dawn Perllman's Linda seems to know more than she lets on.

Regan proves Lukey's part in the theft. But the heavies want him too, and whoever reaches him first decides how this ends. The wedding, you suspect, is doomed either way, which is how Regan earns the full force of Mrs Rix's displeasure no matter what he does. The heavies are anonymous in the way the show's heavies often are, which is the point: they are not the story.

Trevor Preston and Ian Kennedy Martin wrote it, Terry Green directed. James Ottaway's Uncle Billy, Richard Adams, Andrew Mussell, Rosemary Martin and Fanny Carby fill out the edges of a story that is lighter on its feet than most Sweeney openings. It is a comedy, almost, and a welcome one: the show can play the wedding and the robbery in the same breath and make you believe in both. The mercury itself is almost beside the point, a MacGuffin with a price tag.