Grand Expectations

Grand Expectations begins with Ken's motorbike in a ditch. Riding along a snowy country lane, he comes off White Lightning and breaks its rear suspension, and a neighbour has to collect the wreck in a horsebox. For a man whose sense of himself rests on that machine, it is a serious blow.

After a lot of fruitless telephoning, he finds a repair shop, Alpha Bikes, run by Narain Singh and his nephew Ranjit, which can get the part. Narain lets Ken use the workshop. One evening, working late, Ken overhears Ranjit and his wife, Surinder, in a violent argument. She runs. Ken helps her get away on one of Narain's bikes, and Harry, without enthusiasm, gives her a spare room at The Grand.

Narain resents the interference and makes his terms plain: Ken will get his bike back when he returns Surinder. She is terrified of her husband, who is possessive and once locked her in for going out without his permission. She is thinking about divorce but is caught between the expectations of her family and the freedoms she sees around her. Narain and Ranjit come to the hotel and stage a sit-in outside her door.

The episode treats Ken's attempts to help with comedy. Trying to break into the shop at night to retrieve his bike, he sets off the alarm, and while he is busy joyriders steal Doreen's car, which he later finds abandoned with an empty tank. Harry, losing money on the room, wants Surinder out. Ken and Doreen refuse.

It is Ethel who breaks the deadlock, with a stern talking-to that brings out the truth. Surinder is pregnant and afraid of how Ranjit will react. When the families meet and argue, Doreen and Ken get the couple away to talk on their own, and they come back to announce the baby together. Narain pays for the room and returns the bike.

Doreen also has her own trouble. Her ex-husband Jack, in his last appearance, asks her to help a builder friend, Les Rickett, whose business is in difficulty, and she is furious to learn that he has told Les they are still married.

Frances Galleymore's script, directed by Graham Theakston, takes on more than most first-series episodes. It sets a marriage under family pressure in a British Sikh household and gives Sneh Gupta's Surinder a real dilemma. The weakness lies in the ending. A husband who confined his wife is reconciled with her through a pregnancy announcement and a quiet conversation, and the episode does not look hard at what it described earlier.

It is still an important hour for the series, because it puts Ken's beloved bike at stake and shows how far he will go to help a stranger even when it costs him the one possession he cares about.