Something Old, Something New

Something Old, Something New sends Ken to London on a rescue mission for a man he has never met. Murdoch Johnstone, an elderly collector, has been cheated out of his antiques by two corrupt dealers, Philip Banks and Georgina Pemberton, who are already looking for their next victim. Harry asks Ken to get the pieces back.

The timing is awkward. For once, business is picking up at the Ponderosa, and Ken's market garden looks as though it might pay its way. But a friend's request and a wrong to put right are hard for him to refuse, and the trip to London is a measure of how far Ken's odd jobs have already outgrown the advertisement that started them.

Banks and Pemberton are the first proper confidence tricksters in the series, people who prey on the old and trusting, and the episode sets Ken against them in London rather than on his own ground. He succeeds, and the antiques are recovered for Johnstone.

At The Grand, meanwhile, Harry has a guest who will not leave him alone. Mr Dudley is officious and demanding and asks a great many questions about the hotel, and Harry becomes convinced that he is an inspector. The stakes, for Harry, are high: he is hoping to win a contract to house homeless people, and he suspects that Dudley holds the decision.

The script is by Andrew McCulloch and John Flanagan, a writing team, and the director is Graham Theakston, who handled three episodes in the first series. Andrew Keir plays Johnstone, with Richard Heffer and Michelle Newell as the dealers.

The two plots are a good match. Ken's half of the episode is about people who appear respectable and are not. Harry's half is about a man who may or may not be what Harry fears, and Harry's own anxiety does most of the work. Both are stories about judging people by appearances, one with a criminal payoff and one with a comic one.

The weakness is that the London half is a simple errand at heart: Ken goes, Ken recovers, and the dealers never feel like more than a problem to be solved. The episode's place in the series is clearer. It is the first in which Ken sets out to undo a fraud against a vulnerable client, a pattern that the programme returned to repeatedly as he moved from odd jobs towards investigation.

IMDb users rate it, with Glasshouse People, as the best of the first series. The title, from the wedding rhyme, fits a story about old furniture and new tricks, and about Ken discovering a talent he did not know he had.