Prime Suspect (ITV1): Throughout this story, people kept asking Det Supt Jane Tennison if she'd been under any particular stress recently.

The answer, of course, was yes. After 30 years in the job, it had been suggested after her review - or MoT, as she called it - that retirement was a real option, even though she was passed as fit and well.

"Age doesn't compromise ability," she pointed out, before going on to tell a female detective constable and mother-of-two small children that "the level of commitment doesn't suit every officer". That's Tennison-speak for I don't think you're up to the job.

Like those of us of a certain age, Tennison was having problems reading the small print (and, if we're honest, the not-so-small print), but happened to choose an optician who was involved in a murder inquiry that had links with war crimes - massacre, torture and rape - in the Balkans.

No wonder Tennison looked even more harassed than usual, and fled to her elderly father (Frank Finlay) for reassurance.

Fears proved unfounded that after a seven-year gap Prime Suspect would, as so often happens with returning series, not be able to live up to past glories. Peter Berry's The Last Message - which concludes tonight - was a complex and intelligent police thriller story that took in issues and emotions way outside the remit of the usual whodunit.

At the centre was Helen Mirren's marvellously uptight Jane Tennison, a woman determined to do the right thing even when her bosses, the intelligence agencies and war criminals themselves did their best to thwart the course of justice.

The starting point was the discovery of the body of an illegal immigrant in a derelict building in London. She died, the acerbic forensic pathologist told us, through asphyxiation due to manual strangulation. Her legs were covered in cigarette burns, and not for the first time as the scars of previous torture were evident.

Despite a heavy workload of overseeing two dozen or so cases, Tennison decided to take over the running of the investigation from smug, rising officer DCI Simon Finch. "It needs a more experienced guiding hand," she told him, although her motivation had much to do with proving herself after the retirement hint.

She did, of course, get emotionally involved in the story of two sisters, raped in Bosnia during the troubles and who'd seen "the devil" - the man responsible - in a London street.

When Tennison persuaded the surviving sister to give evidence and promised that she'd come to no harm, you knew that her card was marked. Inevitably, last night's episode ended with a tense scene in a hospital as police officers raced to find the woman before the killer did.

Tonight's episode, I must warn you, gets even nastier for all concerned - and even less like a run-of-the-mill police drama. Tennison is in a class of her own as far as TV detectives go. Her quirks aren't a liking for real ale or exercising her little grey cells. She takes her work seriously and personally which is something, as this return proves, that can bring heartache to all concerned.

Published: 10/11/2003