Diamond Seeker opens with Mickey and Emma taking a trip to jewellery fence, Frank Rice, played by Nicholas Ball. Given that once Hazell star has been demoted recently to playing Lenny Henry’s manager in a recent hotel chain commercial, this looks like better work. His character in this might be an unsympathetic letch, but at least he doesn’t get to carry the luggage. Why they do this is something to do with the Grifters Code, which appears to be an idea they borrowed from the Pirates of the Caribbean. They try to get Robert Vaughn to sell it hard, but ‘con-man’ and ‘honour’ aren’t words I generally accept are naturally connected. They need to get the diamond necklace back to Tony Baxter, or at least make him think he has it. This involves them getting Emma to convince him that they haven’t got it, although that does make you wonder how he won’t keep looking for it. The team then sell the real necklace to Baxter’s rival, sealing the deal. Except for this to work as intended assumes that Baxter would never take a close look at his ‘original’, which I just didn’t accept, even if they tell us he won’t “because he’s an old romantic”. I didn’t buy it and I’d worked out the precise method of the swap about five minutes before it actually happened, so no twist actually existed here. They also don’t get anything over on Pinky, and he’s the one that hurt people, so that was a missed opportunity. Despite the neat initial premise, this story was sloppily conceived, and didn’t really make much use of Nick Ball or even Bill Bailey, who turned up again as snitch Cyclops. From the main cast viewpoint this was also a poor outing, with the exception of Robert Vaughn who got some decent screen time. Kelly Adams was given a reasonable slice to develop Emma, but I can’t say her character actually grew much here. I’m hopeful that the last two stories in this season are better than this, because this was a low point of the current production.
