Charity Begins at Home – Part 1

Charity Begins at Home opens the third series by clearing up the second. Ken has recovered from being shot by Terry Brent at the end of the last series and is back at work, but nothing is where he left it. Debbie has left Texas Rangers to get married, and the firm has moved to a seedy office in Smethwick. Harry has sold the Coaching Inn and bought a ballroom in Edgbaston, the Plaza Suite.

Harry's first customer at the ballroom is Richard Jay, played by Hywel Bennett, who wants to stage a charity event there, compered by Matthew Kelly as himself. It goes well until a journalist discovers that Jay and Harry stand to make a handsome profit from it. Television reporters besiege the Plaza Suite, and Harry is forced to admit on camera that the money belongs, morally if not legally, to the charity.

Then Jay disappears, taking all of it with him. Harry, with the cameras watching, promises to pay the money back out of his own pocket. It is the most expensive of his many public embarrassments, and it is not resolved in this episode.

Ken, meanwhile, meets Margaret Daly again. She has left the police. Rushing into the Coaching Inn to rescue him during the siege brought her disciplinary action, and she is now trying to run an investigation agency from home. The meeting is the start of the partnership that shapes the third series.

Texas Rangers has its own crisis. An advertising agency sacks the firm, its managing director, Gerry Pascall, accusing the couriers of passing his ideas to a rival. With the firm's reputation at stake, Ken sets out to find the real leak, and it is Rocky who finds it by accident. Hired privately to deliver some Beaujolais Nouveau for a publicity stunt, he hands it to a man called Langford, who turns out to be working secretly for the rival company and selling Pascall's secrets.

Tony McHale wrote both parts, and Baz Taylor directs. The third series was the last made in Birmingham, shot on location on film, and the title sequence now casts Ken as a detective in a Western saloon, with Margaret and Harry beside him. The DVDCompare review of the series judges that by this point the programme had hit its stride and the cast were comfortable in their parts.

As an opening, the episode has a lot of ground to cover, and it covers it efficiently. The ballroom gives Harry a new stage for his schemes, Margaret's return gives Ken a professional partner, and the espionage plot shows Rocky, the courier, stumbling into detective work before his employer does.

The weakness is structural. As the first half of the series' first two-part story, it ends with its main plot hanging, Jay gone and Harry in debt to a charity. The episode works best as a set-up, and its satisfactions are in the smaller story. But it makes clear where the third series is going: away from odd jobs and couriers, and towards investigation.