David Jason stars as Detective Inspector Jack Frost, a slightly disheveled and extremely disorganized - his filing system consists of piling papers one on top of another - police veteran. Frost is handicapped by a monster of a boss by the name of Superintendent Mullet, who interferes in every step of Frost's investigations in the name of "running a tight ship." The others in the police station in Denton, a fictional location in English suburbia, dislike Mullet almost as much as Frost does, but few of them have the gall to play around with the Superintendent like Frost does. One of the highlights of the show is the interaction between the different members of the police force, and while Frost is the star, the storylines take care to include other members, both young and inexperienced like Frost's renter in One Man's Meat, as well as the well-heeled Mullet himself. Bruce Alexander who plays Mullet and had a small role in the 2002 movie, About a Boy, and James McKenna who plays Sergeant Brady appear in most of the episodes and both of them act superbly, enabling Jason to play off of them and finesse the role of Frost.

The DVD of the fourth season includes four episodes, a couple of which are absolutely excellent. My personal favorite is Appendix Man, in which Frost investigates the death of an art collector who no-one seems to know anything about. The story seems pretty straightforward until one set of fingerprints found in the dead man's apartment matches those of a body pulled from the river a year before. This episode also highlights one of the strong points of this show: ever so often, you get the feeling that the police are not infallible. What this does is to open up the possibility of several new resolutions to the basic mystery, and helps the show seems much closer to real life than most mystery fiction, where the possible suspects are quickly identified at the beginning, and all you have to do is put your money on the least likely candidate.

Private Lives is also an excellent episode, which uses a very light touch to comment on a host of social issues including mental disorders and prostitution. The initial investigation starts with a hit-and-run accident in which a middle-aged woman is left in a coma. As the story unfolds, the apparent focus is on the dark secrets of this seemingly ordinary suburban wife. But a parallel story line draws our attention to how prejudice against the mentally disturbed can erupt into an outright witch hunt. Throughout each of these episodes, we see Frost as an insightful detective, but at the same time, it is clear that he has a very finely tuned social conscience and an almost righteous sense of justice. It is refreshing to see a detective show dwell not only on the injustices that the police can address, but also on those that result from deeply ingrained social mores and so cannot be confronted as easily. In One Man's Meat, too, Frost seems genuinely affected by the plight of the homeless teenagers he sees on the streets of Denton, and even though there is little he can do about them, the nuances in Jason's acting make it clear that Frost is not just an objective observer.

The final episode, Keys to the Car, is a pretty straightforward story about a playboy, a dead drug dealer, and the owner of a stolen car, but in this one as in many of the others, the sharp humor in the script makes the story proceed at a much livelier pace than it would have otherwise. In fact, Frost's dry sense of humor and his attempts to get the better of Mullet provide a sense of continuity throughout the series, so that even though each of the episodes is a perfectly self-contained almost-feature length show, you feel like you are in a familiar set-up. In this era of importing shows wholesale from the U.K (anyone remember Coupling?), Touch of Frost would definitely be one of the better shows to choose.