One Of Your Own

Jimmy Fleet cons two businessmen out of a cache of diamonds, hides the stones, and then gets arrested anyway. Remanded to Wormwood Scrubs with the diamonds safely out of reach, he's sitting on a fortune nobody can prove he has. That makes him interesting to two sets of people: Patsy Kearney, a villain who specialises in thieving off other thieves, and The Sweeney.

The Squad's way in is Carter, who goes undercover as Jimmy's cell-mate and does his cell-mately best to gain the man's confidence. It works. When Jimmy walks free for lack of evidence, he and Carter celebrate with a drinking spree that's rudely interrupted by Kearney and then by the arrival of Regan's mob. Michael Elphick plays Fleet with the shaggy charm that made him such a fixture of this era's crime drama, and Nick Stringer's Kearney is exactly the sort you'd cross the street to avoid.

The trouble is that Jimmy doesn't know where his luck actually stands. His girlfriend is supposed to have the diamonds, but she's double-crossing him; when he reaches her flat and finds it empty, he assumes she's been taken and goes after those he believes responsible, armed. The resulting face-off ends with Jimmy and Carter each doing the other a very big favour, which is as neat a description of their odd friendship as anything.

Tony Hoare and Ian Kennedy Martin wrote it, Christopher Menaul directed, and there's Garfield Morgan as Haskins and John Alkin as DS Tom Daniels, plus Sion Probert as Phil, Rachel Davies as Tina Adams, Neil Hallett as John Morris and Jacky Turner as Steve Taylor. Extra humour comes from Jenny, a barmaid rather taken with policemen, especially in uniform.

A lighter episode by the standards of series four, and all the better for it. Prison comedy plus diamonds plus Elphick: hard to argue with.