Banbury Blue

Banbury Blue begins as a case of sheep rustling and ends somewhere far stranger. Lambert Sampson, a bluff Cumbrian farmer played by Brian Blessed, keeps a flock of Banbury Blue sheep for making cheese, and someone is stealing them. He hires Margaret to find out who.

Rocky is given the night watch and does not start well: he falls asleep. But he notices that the farm is being watched by a young couple, Tabitha and Winston Hammond, who appear to be up to no good. He follows them, and they take him prisoner.

That is how he learns what they are really doing. The Hammonds are not after the sheep at all. They are using the Sampsons' cheeses to smuggle rare falcons' eggs out of the country, and the farm is simply a convenient source of cover.

Harry's story runs at the Plaza Suite, where he is holding afternoon tea dances for pensioners, with Linda singing old songs to set the mood. Harry is not impressed by her interpretation. He is also being bombarded with anonymous love letters, which embarrass him and which he is afraid to answer for fear of hurting their writer. He asks Ken to find out who she is.

Ken reasons that she must be one of the dancers and takes each of the women round the floor in turn. Before long he has his answer. The letters are from Marigold Sampson, Lambert's wife, a compulsive writer and would-be novelist who simply wants a little excitement in her life.

Ewart Alexander wrote the episode and Geoff Husson directs. Brian Blessed and Rosemary Leach play the Sampsons, with Diana Blackburn and Joseph Mydell as the smugglers. It is the last appearance of Barbara Durkin as Glynis.

The episode's neatest touch is that its two plots belong to one marriage. Lambert is losing his sheep and Marigold is writing anonymous love letters to Harry, and the Sampsons' farm is the source of both the crime and the comedy. The DVDCompare review picks out the sheep case as typical of the varied work that the new agency took on.

It is, however, the least admired episode of the first three series among IMDb users, and it is easy to see why. The smuggling plot is slight, its solution arrives through Rocky's capture rather than through detection, and the villains are thinly drawn. The love letters give Harry a pleasant comic problem, but the stakes are low even by the series' standards.

Its interest now is mostly in the cast, with Brian Blessed and Rosemary Leach as the couple at its centre, and in the choice of wildlife smuggling as a crime. For viewers working through the third series, it is a light and forgettable interlude between stronger stories.