The Not-So-Lone Ranger

The Not-So-Lone Ranger closes the Birmingham years with three stories and a lost dream. The first belongs to Rocky. A council officer, Johnson, asks Ken and Margaret to find out who has been painting murals on the sides of houses around the neighbourhood, each signed H Angel. The name suggests a Hells Angel, so Rocky asks around the local bikers and arranges to meet the artist.

H Angel turns out to be a streetwise young woman with a crew of apprentices to mix her paint and hold her ladders. Rocky is supposed to lure her into painting a wall at the Texas Rangers office and tip off his employers. Instead, he falls for her and tells her about the trap. She agrees to paint only where she has been commissioned, with Rocky as her agent.

The main case comes through Jo, Margaret's daughter, who is working at a racing stable in her school holidays. She notices that one of the jockeys, Gerry Hannigan, is under great strain. His wife, Charlie, tells Ken and Margaret why: Sellaby, the owner of the horse she trains and Gerry rides, wants Gerry to lose the race. When Gerry refuses, Charlie is kidnapped, and he gives in.

Ken traces her to one of Sellaby's own stables. To free her he has unexpected help from Tiny Richards, a burly rugby player skilled in judo, who has been competing in the Trivial Pursuit championship Harry is hosting at the Plaza Suite, a contest that has dissolved into accusations of cheating. Ken gets Charlie to the racecourse just as the race is about to start. Gerry sees her safe and rides to win. Sellaby is arrested.

Behind it all, Ken and Margaret have been planning to move to America and set up a detective agency there. Ken is sure that the accumulator bet he has placed on Hannigan's horse will pay for it. After a stewards' enquiry, the bet fails to come in, and he gives up the plan.

Douglas Watkinson, the series' most prolific outside writer, wrote the finale, and Laurence Moody, who directed the very first episode, directs. Caroline Langrishe plays Charlie and Mark Kingston plays Sellaby. It was the last appearance of Amanda Burton as Margaret, of Emma Davies as Jo and of Teddie Thompson as Linda, and the last episode filmed in Birmingham before the series moved to Nottingham.

The title is apt. Ken has spent the third series as half of a partnership rather than a lone rider, and the episode shows how far the series has moved from the invalided odd-job man of Box 13. The racing plot is well built, and its climax at the track, with Gerry riding to win once he knows his wife is safe, is a clean payoff.

The weakness is in the farewell. The plan for America ends with a lost bet rather than a decision, a quiet exit for the partnership that changed the programme. But it closes a period cleanly, and the next series would begin somewhere new.