When Harry Met Janice

When Harry Met Janice is about a security man who hands the key to the people he is paid to keep out. CBS has been hired to organise security at a lingerie warehouse. Not long after, Harry meets Janice Phillips, a woman who takes a shine to him, and the attachment quickly becomes a relationship.

Ken thinks it too much of a coincidence and decides to look into her motives. He finds that Janice and her husband, Jack, are planning to rob the warehouse, and that she is using Harry to get at the plans of its elaborate security system, which are kept at the CBS office.

To spare Harry and the firm the humiliation of a robbery on their own watch, Ken works out a plan to get Harry out of the mess and stop the Phillipses carrying out their raid.

Dennis Waterman, who has a page on this site, plays Jack Phillips, and Lizzy McInnerny plays Janice. Bernard Dempsey wrote the script, and Tom Clegg directs. Alexander Hanson, Peter Jonfield and Duncan Preston are among the supporting players.

Harry's romances are a running subject of the series, from Yvonne Higgins, the first girl he proposed to, in the third series, to the escort he mistakes for a date in the fifth. Janice turns his feelings into a security risk.

The strength lies in the choice of target. The Phillipses do not have to beat CBS's alarms or locks. They need only Harry's affection, and Harry, who has been the series' optimist and its victim of misfortune since the first episode, is the weakest point in any security system he designs. Wikipedia's account of the programme says the comedy often comes from Harry's best-laid plans going awry, and here it is Harry's trust that is exploited.

The casting of Waterman gives the episode extra interest. Boon has often been compared with Minder, in which Waterman played Terry McCann. The series' co-creator Jim Hill has said that he once resubmitted a rejected Minder script with Ken and Harry's names on it, and Wikipedia notes that, unlike Minder, neither Ken nor Harry does anything illegal. In this episode the star of the rival programme appears as a thief whom Ken has to outwit, which is a neat reversal of the usual comparison.

The structure is familiar: a charming stranger, a coincidence too good to be true, and a friend who prefers not to hear it. It is a familiar shape for the series, but Waterman's presence and Harry's genuine feeling give it an edge. It is an entertaining example of the programme turning its sidekick into the target.