The Tender Trap

The Tender Trap is a pre-Christmas episode with a cruel plot at its centre. Lawrence Drake, a rich former racing driver, is crippled after a track accident. He asks Ken to watch his wife, Pamela, because he suspects she is having an affair, and he feels he has nothing to offer her.

Pamela and her lover, Alex Cavendish, are robbed at gunpoint as they drive home late from a restaurant, and her jewellery is stolen. A blackmail demand follows: pay and the jewels will be returned. Pamela, desperate, begins to gamble heavily and tries to borrow from loan sharks.

Ken follows her and sees her with Alex. He sends Laura to call on Alex, posing as a magazine researcher, and she learns his name and that he imports wine. Pamela sees Ken tailing her again and pleads with him not to tell Lawrence about Alex or the jewellery, because she does not want to hurt her husband.

At a wine-tasting, Harry and Laura learn that Alex is selling his stock very cheaply. He is working with the thieves. When Pamela says she intends to leave Lawrence and move in with him, he panics, realising she will probably tell Lawrence everything and call the police. The thieves break into the CBS offices, beat up Ken and warn him off.

Ken reports to Lawrence, who admits that he knew all about Alex and the robbery. He wanted to convince Pamela what kind of man Alex was and how easily he could be tempted to steal.

Rocky's subplot is gentler. A chirpy Liverpudlian teenager, Pandora, asks Ken to trace the father who left her mother before she was born. With Rocky's help she finds her grandmother, who takes her to meet him. He is now managing director of a frozen-chicken company, and offers her a house, a job and a holiday in Barbados. She turns him down as too middle-class and materialistic, and goes to live with her grandmother.

Harry thinks the Christmas party planned by Smudger, the landlord of the Drum, is tasteless, and organises his own. He and Laura dress as Santas and Ken wears a red nose, but nobody comes. Harry assumes that they are all at Smudger's rival Tarts and Vicars party. Then Smudger and his guests arrive, having taken pity on him.

Veronica Henry wrote the episode and John Woods directs. Ronald Pickup plays Lawrence, Cheryl Campbell is Pamela, and Art Malik is Alex.

The strength is the trap. Ken has been working for a man who set up the very crime he hired him to investigate, and the staging of the robbery was a way of showing his wife what her lover was. It is a hard, intelligent plot, and the highest-rated of the series with IMDb users.

The weakness is that the explanation arrives in a conversation after the beating, so the audience learns it as Ken does. The Christmas party is a warm counterweight, and Smudger's arrival is a good way to end the year.