Special Delivery

Special Delivery puts Texas Rangers on the wrong end of a parcel. Harry wants to extend the Coaching Inn and is courting a local councillor, James Petherbridge, in the hope of a kind word at the planning meeting. The extension would mean knocking down the stables that house Ken's courier firm, which gives Ken his own stake in the outcome.

Petherbridge is already a target. Linda West, an ambitious television reporter, is convinced that he takes gifts in return for passing planning applications, and his recent holiday in Sardinia looks like proof. Then Ken delivers him a package that turns out to contain pornographic books. The police arrive as he hands it over, and the courier firm is implicated in whatever is going on.

To clear his own name, Ken works back along the delivery. The material came from a seedy club run by a man named Sillitoe, who admits under pressure that he was paid to send it by someone called Roy Farmer. The package was a set-up.

The solution is a sting played on live television. Ken tells West that he has evidence that Harry has bribed Petherbridge, and agrees to say so on air. Petherbridge offers to appear too. On camera, Ken denies everything and suggests that West has misunderstood. Petherbridge then reads a letter from the owner of a sports centre, showing that one of its employees, Farmer, sent the books as a prank.

He goes further. He admits freely that the sports-centre owner did try to use the Sardinian holiday to bribe him over plans for a casino, and points out that the council records show he voted against them. The scandal West came looking for exists, but its villain is not the man she was chasing, and she is left humiliated in front of her own audience.

Meanwhile Rocky is wearying of deliveries to Mrs Sefton, a customer with designs on him, and Harry's campaign against the stables collapses on two fronts. An environmental health officer finds the bikes are not too noisy, and the stables turn out to be protected by a preservation order. Ken's base is safe.

Paul Wheeler's script, directed by Bren Simson, is neatly plotted, and the reversal at the end is satisfying because it uses West's own medium against her. Diane Keen, who has a page on this site, plays the reporter, and Simon Rouse plays the councillor.

The weakness is that the satire of television journalism is broad. West is a target rather than a person, and the episode never wonders whether her suspicions, which were not unreasonable, deserved a better hearing. But the plotting is among the tidiest of the second series, and the image of Ken lying to a live camera in a good cause is very much the character: honest at heart, and quite prepared to bend the truth to protect someone he believes in.