In 1951 the Festival of Britain marks a new golden age of hope and prosperity for the country. Things are certainly looking up for the criminal elite who run the East End. For Jack, a draft-dodger with aspirations to be a champion boxer, there's easy money to be made for providing a bit of muscle. Meanwhile his sister Kath must keep secret the fact that she killed their father to protect her son, Brian, from the abuse she experienced as a child. Brian is so traumatised by witnessing this event that the complex union of violence and sexuality will shape his character for life. As the years go by and disillusion sets in, successive Labour and Tory governments aren't able to stop the rot. Younger, nastier criminals like the Kray twins and the Richardson brothers begin to carve out their own criminal empires and crush all resistance. Brutalised and embittered by years of failure and imprisonment, Jack decides to make a stand. The stage is set for one big war. Crime and Punishment is the first volume in a two-part epic, and follows the characters' lives up until the accession of Thatcher. The second volume will trace the dramatic changes in criminal society that reflected the wider social upheaval of the times, right up until the present day.

The ambitious and flawed John Deed has made many enemies during his career both as a QC and as a judge on the High Court bench. While presiding over a murder trial, Deed comes to suspect that it is a vindictive politician who should be in the dock for the crime. As he investigates this avenue, powerful people in government conspire to create the opportunity to pull him down once and for all. Deed's persistence in trying to get at the truth brings threats both to him and his on-off lover, Jo Mills QC, and he then finds himself accused of a heinous crime. As circumstantial evidence piles against him, soon there is little help for Deed either from friends or colleagues. At last his enemies see a way of settling old scores and he must face his greatest challenge ever.

Complete second series about the maverick judge, played by Martin Shaw, who has made it to the High Court without the help of the old boys' network and who struggles against an overly-bureaucratic system in his search for justice and truth. In this series a call girl is murdered and an Arab Sheikh is in the frame but the government wants it kept quiet; a young man with learning disabilities is charged with murder but there's no evidence; an old lover rekindles her interest in Deed but it's soon apparent that she needs a judge more than a lover and a child's parents go against his wishes and put him through a heart transplant and he dies on the slab. Episodes are: 'Political Expediency', 'Abuse of Power', 'Nobody's Fool' and 'Everyone's Child'.