All in a Day's Pork

All in a Day's Pork is a comedy of misplaced cargo with a love story folded into it. Ken is hired by Amelia Woods, secretary at a meat-processing factory, who wants to know why dictation tapes and letters keep going missing from the office and then reappearing a few days later.

Two of the drivers, Bert and Joe, tell him there is something odd about the firm. Late-night deliveries from Amsterdam are never entered in the books and are treated differently from the rest of the stock, and the owner, Mr Sandford, and his son-in-law Trevor seem to be involved.

Ken enlists Laura and Rocky. They stage a road accident to hold up the lorry carrying the special cargo and take one of the boxes back to Woodcote Park. When it has thawed, they find under the bacon a cache of pornographic magazines and videos. Helen is appalled and asks them to take it away.

The hotel is busy with other matters. A local businessman, Ben Seymour, invites Harry and Helen to a jousting tournament, where they are drawn into a rivalry between the Black Knight, the White Knight and the damsel they are fighting over, in the lists and in life. Harry has also bought Helen a talking parrot as a present, which Rocky lets escape, and Harry has to go in search of it.

The story that matters is Ken's. Late one night Rebecca Patterson, a Texan staying in a cottage nearby, asks Ken and Harry for help when her fuses blow. Ken and Rebecca begin an affair.

Jane Hollowood wrote the episode and Frank W. Smith directs. Pamela Bellwood plays Rebecca, and Karl Johnson plays Joe the driver.

The best joke is the frozen box. A team of detectives hijack a lorry, haul away a case of what they expect to be contraband, and find it full of ordinary meat until the thaw, which is a good visual gag as well as a clue. It is the sort of scene Boon does well, with the investigation advanced by an ordinary object.

The weakness is how much else the episode has to carry. The jousting, the parrot and the smuggling are three distinct comic strands, and none of them leaves much behind. The smuggling is exposed only as far as the box, and the writer is plainly in a hurry to get to the love story.

That story is why the episode matters. Ken's affairs have usually lasted an episode, and in these last two instalments he is serious about a woman in a way he has not been before in the series. The episode ends on a note that promises more, and the finale shows where it leads.