One Last Hurrah

Nick Hall is the new DCI, and he arrives with a theory already loaded. Plastic explosives have been stolen from an army truck, and Hall is certain the culprits are the Sewer Rats, a gang he chased in the seventies. The rest of the team, Matteo included, looks at the new boss like he's living in the past. He's sure of it, and he's not the sort of man to be talked out of a certainty.

And the past turns out to be exactly where the case is. The more the squad digs, the more Hall's old theory holds up, and the doubters start coming round one by one. Then a gang war threatens to erupt, and suddenly the old man's experience looks less like nostalgia and more like a map. The old-fashioned instinct starts looking like experience.

The centrepiece is the undercover operation at a society wedding, with gunmen massing for a shoot-out and Hall in his element. Nicholas Ball gives him the right authority, a copper who has seen this kind of trouble before and isn't about to be surprised by it. A copper playing the wedding guest while the gunmen drift through the crowd. Amanda Holden's Camilla Barker and James Laurenson's Dave Barker carry the wedding-party end, while Michelle Joseph's Briony Oxford, Simone Lahbib's Lucy McCarthy and Bryan Marshall's Don Roberts keep the official side busy.

Matthew Graham and Roy Mitchell wrote it, Terence Daw directed, and the guest list does its work: Robert Beck's Neil Jason, Adam Christopher's Captain Gerrard, Charles Cork's Jackie and Stewart Harwood's Lenny Cooke filling in the world around the case.

It went out in November 1997, and the title suits a man getting one more shot at old enemies. There's real affection in the way the episode treats Hall, and it's earned. By the end, even the sceptics in the squad room are glad he's on their side.