Smokey and the Band

Smokey and the Band gives Ken a love story and takes away his motorbike in the same week. Harry wants live music at the Coaching Inn. A theatrical agent, Frankie Bass, recommends a country and western band, Bronco Billy's Boys, and Harry, true to form, books them privately to avoid paying her fee.

The band breaks down on the way to Birmingham, and Ken goes to the rescue. He falls for their singer, Bebe McLintock. For a man who has spent the series imagining himself as a cowboy hero, a country singer is the obvious romance, and the episode enjoys the fit.

The band is not a happy one. Frankie turns up demanding her share of the money Harry thought he had saved. Bebe and Bronco argue constantly, and she is angry that she is not allowed to sing her own songs. Eventually she walks out and ends up with Ken, and for a while it looks as though she will leave the band and stay with him.

She does not. Bebe turns out to be Bronco Billy's wife, and when he decides that he needs her, offers her top billing and lets her sing her own material, she goes back. Ken's romance lasts about as long as the booking.

Meanwhile White Lightning disappears. It is P T Hudson, another member of the band, who spots it in a back-street garage belonging to a disreputable dealer, Arch Clanton. Clanton will not give the bike back, though he will happily sell it. Ken takes matters into his own hands and steals it back. Harry, who has quietly arranged to buy the bike from Clanton as a present, sees Clanton follow Ken to the hotel, misreads the scene and pays up anyway.

Jim Hill wrote the episode alone, and Robert Tronson directs. Fiona Hendley plays Bebe and Alun Lewis plays Bronco Billy, with Dudley Sutton as Clanton.

The episode is slight, and its two plots are joined by little more than the band. But it is good-natured in a way that shows the programme at its most relaxed. The romance is over when the booking is, and the business with the stolen bike gives Harry his best moment: a generous act, undertaken in secret, that costs him money for nothing because he cannot quite keep up with events.

That is the Harry Crawford of the whole series in a single gesture, and the episode is worth seeing for it. The title, a play on the Burt Reynolds film Smokey and the Bandit, also nods to the fire brigade, where a smokey is a fireman. Ken has left the brigade but keeps the nickname, and in this episode the Western image the series has built around him finally gets its soundtrack.