Texas Rangers

Texas Rangers opens the second series with both men starting again. Harry has sold The Grand and bought the Coaching Inn in Edgbaston, a hotel with ambitions. Doreen has gone to Spain. Ken has put money into the new place and has a business of his own in its stables: Texas Rangers, a motorcycle courier firm, with a flat for him upstairs.

He has also, without knowing it, bought trouble. The old radio set and walkie-talkies he purchased from an Irishman named Flannery belong to a rival firm, Romany Riders, run by Lomas and his son Mickey. The Lomases have a protection racket on the side, and Mickey and two friends, Des and Parrot, arrive to tell Ken that he will be paying them a share of his takings.

Ken refuses, in terms that the DVDCompare review singles out as pure Western: he works for himself, and he pays a slice to nobody. The reply is that his brakes are tampered with. He crashes leaving a car park, unhurt, but with his bike damaged.

The crash is witnessed by Rocky Cassidy, one of the Romany Riders couriers, from a transport cafe across the way. Rocky is not bright, but he has principles, and the Lomases have broken the one that matters most to him: you do not attack another biker. He changes sides.

At the hotel, Harry's grand opening is going wrong. The mayor cannot come, and the only dignitary available is Emlyn Price Jones, a Welsh MP staying in the hotel and already the worse for drink, played by Ronald Lacey. The local paper will print a photograph only if it arrives before the deadline. Price Jones also accosts the chambermaid, Debbie Yates, who promptly resigns and takes a job as Ken's dispatcher.

The two plots meet on the road. Ken sets off with the photographs and is ambushed by Mickey's Hells Angels. Rocky rescues him, the gang are picked up by the police, the pictures reach the paper, and Ken offers Rocky a job as the first rider of Texas Rangers.

Guy Meredith's script, directed by Christopher King, does a great deal of rebuilding in fifty minutes, and does it cleanly. It introduces the new base, the new business, Lesley-Anne Sharpe's Debbie and, most importantly, Neil Morrissey's Rocky, in his first major television role. Rocky stayed for the rest of the run, and his good-natured dimness became one of the programme's main sources of comedy.

The villains are the weakest element. The Hells Angels are drawn in broad strokes, and the racket is a familiar device after Glasshouse People. But the series' second start is more confident than its first. The second series was shot on film on location, and the courier business gives Ken a reason to be on his motorbike every week. Boon has found the form it would keep for several years.