Beef Encounter

Beef Encounter puts Ken on the payroll of the wrong man. Eddie Allen owns Fast Eddie, a chain of fast-food restaurants that runs on cheap teenage labour, and his staff have had enough. They begin picketing his shops for better conditions, and Allen hires Ken to find out who is organising them.

Ken goes in among the protesters and, before long, finds himself on their side. Their leader is not a firebrand student but an elderly widow, Barbara Drake. Her husband was killed in an industrial accident at a waste-disposal plant that Allen used to run, and the strike is her way of making him pay.

Barbara has a further plan, and Ken advises against it. She ignores him. She poisons food at Allen's restaurants to wreck their reputation, and the result is a local epidemic of food poisoning. Then she gives herself up to the police.

Harry, meanwhile, is preparing an American pageant and square dance at the Plaza Suite, with a troupe called the Vortex Players. Among them he finds Yvonne, the first girl he ever proposed to, now married to Brian Temple, an overbearing man who belittles her at every turn. Harry still has feelings for her. She thinks of him as a brother.

He encourages her to stand up to Brian, half hoping that the marriage will end. It does not. When Yvonne confronts her husband, they end up closer than before. Harry does get one consolation. Before the pageant, Brian ate a hamburger at Fast Eddie's, one that Barbara had poisoned, and in the middle of the performance he is violently sick.

Harry Duffin wrote the script and Sarah Hellings directs. Muriel Pavlow plays Barbara, Neil Dickson plays Eddie Allen, and Anne Reid plays Yvonne, with Bernard Brown as her husband.

The episode's strongest element is Ken's change of allegiance. He is hired as an employer's spy and ends as the workers' ally, and the case turns on a grief that the law never addressed. Barbara's revenge is wrong, Ken tells her so, and she accepts the consequences. It is a more serious moral situation than the series usually allows, and the story gives Barbara a reason without excusing her.

The weakness is the use the episode then makes of her crime. An epidemic of food poisoning is not a small thing, and turning it into the comic payoff of Harry's romantic subplot, with Brian's sickness on stage as the final joke, sits awkwardly beside the grief that drove it. The two halves of the episode want different things from the same hamburger.

The title, a pun on Brief Encounter, fits Harry's story of an old love briefly rekindled, and the beef of the other story. It is an uneven hour, but one with more anger in it than most, and Ken's decision to take the side of the people he was hired to expose is very much in character.