Peter Davison stars as 'Dangerous' Davies the dogged detective with a St Bernard's dog who gets all the jobs deemed to be a waste of time by his bosses who see him as old fashioned and dull.
The pilot episode is an adaptation of a novel by Leslie Thomas and was already made as a one off television movie in 1981 which starred Bernard Cribbins.
Davison's portrayal is not as idiosyncratic as Cribbins. He plays Davies as a decent man in a hard world, but Davies has a steely edge as well.
He stumbles into a cold case of missing 17 year old back in 1982 and decides to investigate her disappearance 20 years later and finds out that the police at the time did not do a good job.
I actually found the episode rather leisurely paced, the humour is more laid back and so is the quirkiness. In the Cribbins version, Davies kept getting bandaged up after every mishap, by the end of the movie he was almost mummified.
Joanne Froggatt plays the missing girl in flashbacks as well as her sister in the present day where the makers put a hideous wig on her.
I thought this was a disappointing first episode, subsequent episodes in the series were better.