Away from It All

Away from It All sends Ken on holiday and, as the series likes to arrange, finds him a job to do. After handling a messy adultery case, he is strained and tired, and he is on the verge of giving up private investigation altogether. Harry steps in to relieve what he calls his partner's executive stress.

His remedy is a short stay at Greenham Grange, a luxury rural retreat run by a nephew. It is the kind of place that advertises peace, and in which, on television, nothing is allowed to stay peaceful. During their stay Ken and Harry discover that strange things are going on. There are reports of vandalism and threats, and life at the retreat turns out to be less serene than it looks.

The episode is a variation on a pattern the series has used since the second year, in which Harry's attempts to improve his friend's life send them into a case. Here the cure and the complaint swap places: the rest cure becomes the investigation, and the exhausted detective is back at work.

The guests include Lynn Farleigh as a Mrs Nora Middleton, Tom Beard and Jane Cunliffe as the Palmers, and Nicholas Gleaves, among others. Bernard Dempsey wrote the script, and Tim Dowd directs. Among the other credited parts are Roger Hyams as Harry's doctor, David Ashton as a Mr Parris and Robert Reynolds as Richard Henderson; a doctor for Harry suggests that the strain is not confined to Ken.

It is worth noting what the premise says about Ken. For six series he has been the sympathetic man who takes on other people's troubles, who cannot turn down a woman in distress, and who rides a motorbike into the next problem. An episode that begins with him close to giving it up acknowledges the cost of that.

Michael Elphick's Ken is described by Television Heaven as having charm, wit and vulnerability, and this is a story that draws on the last of those. Daker's Harry, meanwhile, was a man the Guardian's obituary described as running hotels, a ballroom and a country club before CBS,.

IMDb users give it a middling score, and the premise is more developed than any of the episode's recorded detail.

The idea is a good one for a late episode of a long-running series: the detective who needs a holiday, the friend who insists, and the holiday that turns out to need him.