Trudy's Grit

Trudy's Grit brings a new rider to Texas Rangers and, with her, a grievance that runs back decades. Trudy is a striking blonde biker who joins the firm, and Rocky is lost the moment she arrives. What he does not know at first is who her father is, or how far she is prepared to go on his behalf.

Her father is Lord Alderley, an elderly widower living in a large house called Holmhead. In his youth he was a famous motorbike road-racer, and while working for the manufacturer Lawsons he designed one of its most important improvements, the Lawson Front Fork. Lawsons, now owned by a Japanese company, never paid him for it. Now he is deep in debt and about to lose the house.

Trudy decides to act. She tries to poison the building-society men who have come to repossess Holmhead, and since they are staying at the Coaching Inn, the result is a suspected outbreak of food poisoning at Harry's hotel. Environmental health officers take an interest, and the wine festival Harry has been organising with the council collapses.

Her next step is more direct. With Rocky's help she kidnaps Matthew Lawson of the company and takes him to Holmhead to persuade him that Lawsons owes her father a moral debt, whatever the law says. Ken works out what they have done and goes after them.

The resolution is the bikes. In the cellar at Holmhead, Lawson finds Lord Alderley's collection of motorcycles and sees a use for it. He arranges for the Japanese parent company to settle the debts in return for opening a museum of the machines at the house. The deal is struck just as the repossession men arrive to serve their notice.

Matthew Bardsley wrote the episode and Sarah Hellings directs, using Swinfen Hall near Lichfield as a location. Kirsten Hughes plays Trudy and Llewellyn Rees plays her father. The fan site notes a curiosity: the end credits name the industrialist Nigel Lawson, the name of the Chancellor of the Exchequer at the time, although the script calls him Matthew.

The episode suits a series about a man who loves an old British motorbike. Lord Alderley is a version of what Ken might have become, a rider whose machines outlasted the industry that built them, and the museum ending puts the old bikes where Ken would want them, on display rather than sold off.

The weakness is moral. Trudy poisons a group of men, causes trouble for an innocent hotel and then kidnaps a businessman, and the ending rewards her family without asking her to answer for any of it. Rocky's part in the kidnapping is treated in the same forgiving way. It is the comedy-drama's light touch at its least convincing.

As a portrait of Rocky in love, though, it is affectionate, and it gives Neil Morrissey a substantial part as a young man led into real trouble by loyalty to someone he admires.