Billy the Kid

Billy the Kid gives Ken his first celebrity to mind, and the celebrity is a problem in a bottle. Harry is staging a charity football match between the fire brigade and a team of former professionals, and his star attraction is Billy Buchan, a Scottish footballer known as the Kid, flown in from Hong Kong and booked into The Grand. Billy is also a notorious drinker.

His manager, Peter Grant, takes a quarter of his earnings and has a deal in prospect. Wally Patterson, manager of the Saudi Arabian national team, and Abdul Ibrahim, one of its sponsors, are coming to the match to consider Billy as captain and coach. Grant hires Ken to keep him sober.

He fails almost at once. Billy gets through a bottle of vodka before the visitors arrive, Harry stalls them, and Ethel's attempts to sober him up come to nothing. With Patterson staying in the same hotel, Ken takes Billy out of sight to the Ponderosa on the back of his motorbike, only to find that three local boys have flooded his greenhouse and destroyed his winter stock. Their whip-round to pay for it raises a few pence.

Things then get worse. Patterson and Ibrahim find Billy in a clinch with Gloria, a Liverpudlian, and he introduces her as his wife. His real wife, Rhoma, arrives from Glasgow after an anonymous phone call. The deal collapses, Grant disowns his client, and Billy rides off on Ken's bike.

Ken finds him back at the Ponderosa, teaching football to the boys who wrecked the greenhouse, and talks him into playing. Ethel and Doreen persuade Rhoma to give him one more chance. The villain turns out to be Patterson, who arranged both Gloria's visit and the call to Rhoma because he feared that a younger coach would take his job. Ken exposes him, Ibrahim watches Billy play and sacks Patterson, and offers Billy the post. Billy turns it down. Rhoma has agreed to have him back.

Pete Barwood's script is one of the best-constructed of the first series. The obvious obstacle, Billy's drinking, conceals the real one, a rival protecting his own position, and the clue is planted in the business deal rather than the bar. Brian Morgan directs, and Malcolm Jamieson plays Billy.

The greenhouse subplot is well judged. It costs Ken another season's income, and the boys who caused the damage become the means of bringing Billy back to the game. The episode ties its threads together more neatly than most of its neighbours.

Its weakness is the treatment of drink. Billy's alcoholism is a comic obstacle for most of the hour and is set aside at the end with remarkable speed, as though a reconciliation and a kickabout were a cure. That is the convention of the period, and of the series' light touch, but it rings hollow beside the episode's sharper observation of the money around the game.