A Ride on the Wild Side

A Ride on the Wild Side is the episode that brings Margaret Daly into Ken's life, and it does so by arresting him. It begins with a delivery. Ken takes a package to a house that turns out to be a studio for pornographic films, and its director, Barry Drinkwater, learns that Ken is connected with the Coaching Inn. He would like to film there.

Ken warns Harry off. Harry, who cannot resist the word publicity, thinks it might be good for the hotel. That is the comic strand, and it is soon overtaken by a serious one.

Debbie's younger sister, Lindy, arrives from Liverpool. She has run away from home and says there is nothing to go back for. Harry gives her part-time work behind the hotel bar, where Drinkwater meets her one evening and lures her away with the promise of a part in one of his films. Ken and Debbie know exactly what that would involve.

They track her down to a flat above a sex shop and take her away. On the way out, Ken is pressed by the shop's assistant to accept some free goods. He walks out with his arms full and straight into the hands of Detective Constable Margaret Daly of the Vice Squad, who has been trying, without success, to gather evidence that will put Drinkwater in prison.

Once she accepts that Ken is innocent, the two of them get on rather better. He asks her out, and at her house he discovers that she has a teenage daughter, Jo. Margaret then decides on a trap. Jo goes to Drinkwater's nightclub, Ken plants a tape recorder, and Margaret takes photographs as the director approaches the girl. Margaret arrests him for importuning a minor. Between them, Ken, Margaret, Jo and Debbie persuade Lindy to go home.

Billy Hamon wrote the episode and Moira Armstrong directs. Tricia Penrose plays Lindy and Peter Blake plays Drinkwater, and Ray Winstone has a guest part, one the DVDCompare review picks out among the second series' notable faces. Amanda Burton makes her first appearance as Margaret, with Emma Davies as Jo.

The importance of the episode lies in Margaret. Amanda Burton stayed until the end of the third series and became Ken's partner in Boon-Daly Investigations, the first of the women around him to bring professional experience of detection to the work. Her introduction, a policewoman arresting the hero for carrying the wrong shopping, is a good comic entrance.

The weakness is the sting. Margaret uses her own teenage daughter as bait for a man she knows preys on young girls, and the episode treats the plan as a clever piece of police work rather than as the risk it plainly is. Even the fan site that records the episode in detail calls the method underhand. It sits awkwardly in a story whose purpose is to rescue another teenager from the same man.

That aside, the episode takes on a dark subject within the comedy format, and it changes the series. From here Ken has a partner who knows how investigation is actually done.