Daughters (1)

The Vice opens its first episode in familiar territory: the West End vice squad, dealing with prostitution, pornography and the occasional murder. Inspector Pat Chappel and his team have a high-class pimp, David Hinkley, under surveillance, and they are meant to be protecting his girls. They are too slow. One of Hinkley's girls is killed, and the case that began as a turf war between two pimps turns personal.

A working girl called Nikki comes to Chappel for help. He wants her to make a statement against Hinkley, and he offers her a room in a hostel for her trouble. Nikki turns him down. Hinkley is bailed pending further enquiries, and he goes looking for Nikki, convinced she informed on him. What he does not know is that his own daughter, Natasha, has already turned up at the same place.

Nikki and Hinkley quarrel. Natasha hides in the bathroom and listens. Then Hinkley loses his temper and shoves Nikki out of a first-floor window. His daughter sees the whole thing. That is the moment the murder squad takes over, and Chappel is not pleased about it.

But there is a quiet thread underneath the violence. Natasha has hidden an envelope holding the evidence the squad need to charge her father, and a frightened girl's nerve may matter more than any raid. The episode was written by Barry Simner and directed by Douglas Mackinnon, with Ken Stott's Chappel backed by Caroline Catz as PC Cheryl Hutchins, David Harewood as DI Joe Robinson and Anna Chancellor as Dr Christina Weir.

It is a grim, fairly tidy opener. The show knows that the worst damage in a street-crime case often comes from inside a family, and it lets the camera sit with Natasha long enough to make that land. Struan Rodger's Hinkley is a believable brute, more pathetic than scary. Not subtle, but it does not need to be.