This week's final edition of The Thick Of It contained what may be the last innocent Jim'll Fix It joke in TV fiction, when Chris Addison's Ollie Reeder fantasised about sending a letter to the show to solve a Labour party crisis. Stand by now for a deluge of deliberate and hostile Savile references in comedy and drama.

But, having already become the first TV star to make more impact on the schedules dead than alive, Jimmy Savile made his most curious posthumous contribution so far in this week's final episode of the ninth series of BBC1's New Tricks.

This story – titled Glasgow UCOS and written by the show's creator, Roy Mitchell – had already been postponed from the previous Monday because it involved allegations of a paedophile ring operating in children's care homes, a plot-line judged too sensitive by the BBC before Hurricane Sandy caused a relative drop in the levels of the Savile tidal wave.

However, when the show was finally screened, it proved to have a rather startling relationship with the former star of the channel on which it was being transmitted.

Two members of the cold case review squad – Gerry Standing (Dennis Waterman) and Steve McAndrew (Denis Lawson) – drove to Glasgow to serve as consultants on a new re-investigations unit being set up there.

The first of the unsolved homicides involved James Soutar, a wealthy "lifelong bachelor" who had been pursued since his death by rumours of a "secret dark other life".

Although Soutar's will had left "three million quid that mainly went to children's charities", there were allegations that he had been involved in a sex ring – also involving senior police officers and politicians – that procured underage girls from care homes.

Now any similarities may be no more than a spooky coincidence, however the alleged paedophile invented by Roy Mitchell not only has the same initials as Savile but an identical first name (although the script notes that intimates called him "Jimmy") and a matching number of letters in the surname? It's true that James Soutar was a Glaswegian bookmaker, but Savile had a Scottish connection – keeping a Highland holiday home that was recently searched by police – and was the son of a bookie. Soutar's final bequest to children's charities was also close to the amount that Savile left to his own charitable foundations. The implications of involvement with senior establishment figures are also, as we now know, a factor in the Savile case.

It's common for fiction writers to get round issues of legality or taste by creating a composite figure with nudgingly familiar details. While Savile was still alive, the crime-writer Val McDermid featured a character called Jacko Vance (Savile's middle-name was Vince) in the Wire in the Blood books. Played in the TV adaptations by John Michie, Vance is a much-loved Northern TV celebrity who hid a predilection for raping and torturing young women.

Watching the New Tricks episode, my view was that this police series may have done something similar. Although Savile would have been beyond the protection of libel law at the time the storyline was written and filmed, the allegations of collusion involving the legal establishment and children's homes potentially involved living figures and so would have required subterfuge.

Late in the episode, though, something striking happened that can only be discussed by spoiling the plot and so anyone intending to catch up on iPlayer or DVD box-set should look away now.

After Standing and McAndrew had been frustrated by the difficulty of investigating a case in which the assumed criminal is dead – another prescient resonance with the Savile affair – the reveal in the final moments was that James Soutar had been falsely demonised. The Glaswegian bookie was a saint and philanthropist who intervened to protect young girls from the appetites of their powerful friends, giving the victims money to escape and start new lives elsewhere.

So, weirdly, having been pulled from the schedules because it might have seemed too close to the circumstances of the current controversy, the episode now felt too far removed. New Tricks now seemed to be serving as some inadvertent piece of BBC balance, alerting viewers to the possibility that there might be an innocent explanation for what happened and that Savile may have been operating as an undercover anti-paedophile agent.

In fact, the explanation may be that the edition was a covert dramatisation of aspects of the Savile allegations but that the demands of peak-time crime drama – which requires several twists before the end – dictated the improbable denouement. While, viewers can go into an episode of Panorama with a rough idea of what happened and come out convinced that it did, a peak-time drama audience wants to have its suspicions subverted.

The episode remains, though, an intriguing footnote to the Savile business. Oddly, New Tricks is part of a Monday-night schedule that also prominently includes Panorama. The disgraced star of Saturday nights now haunts a different part of peak-time.