A Fistful of Pesetas

A Fistful of Pesetas brings Harry's past to the Coaching Inn. His ex-wife, Alison, the woman who left him in Spain, arrives in Birmingham with a new man in tow. Luis Perez is Spanish and in debt to a wine dealer named Teddy Rawlingston.

Luis has smuggled cash into the country to pay Rawlingston. Alison mislays it. Harry, who has been telling himself that that part of his life is over, offers to settle the debt on her behalf, which shows how far over it really is.

Harry is also trying to look after his own finances. His financial adviser, Mr Marsden, is guiding him towards buying a share in a forest as a way of saving tax, another of the money-making schemes that seldom make money.

Ken and Rocky, meanwhile, are struggling to deliver a statue to a university lecturer who does not seem to want it. They come to suspect that it contains drugs. After a car chase and an arrest in the hotel car park, they discover that they have stumbled on something different but just as serious: a gang smuggling jade.

The missing cash, in the end, turns up in the most obvious place, under the reception desk at the Coaching Inn. Before Harry can lay hands on it, the holdall is loaded into a taxi with a departing guest's luggage and disappears again.

Gerald G. Moore wrote the script and Baz Taylor directs. Georgina Hale plays Alison, Tony Slattery plays Luis, and Christopher Benjamin plays the wine dealer. The title borrows from Sergio Leone's A Fistful of Dollars, keeping the series' Western habit going in a story with a Spanish accent.

The episode's interest is in Harry. The series rarely looks at the life he had before the hotels, and here the marriage that sent him home from Spain walks through the door. His readiness to pay a debt that is not his, for a woman who left him, is the clearest statement in the early series of a man whose generosity outruns his judgement.

The weakness is that the plots never quite connect, and the money story ends in a shrug. The cash is lost to a taxi rather than recovered or spent, which is a joke, but a thin one after the trouble it has caused. The jade-smuggling strand is more satisfying, and gives Ken and Rocky a genuine piece of detection.

It is a middling episode by IMDb users' reckoning, and its value is mostly as a portrait of Harry. The episode gives David Daker an ex-wife to play against, and that is the reason to watch it.