Love or Money

Love or Money is a story about what sudden wealth does to an elderly couple. Bob and Eileen Wooley have won a fortune on the pools, and soon afterwards they begin to receive nasty letters and threats. They hire Ken to protect them from a gang of unscrupulous people who are after their money.

It is a classic protection job, the kind of work the series has asked of Ken since his first client, and it brings with it the dilemma that he often finds. TheTVDB's one-line description is that Ken gets emotionally involved with a wealthy woman, a 65-year-old pools winner. The question the title poses, whether the interest is in love or money, seems to apply to everyone around the Wooleys, and, in the end, perhaps to the detective as well.

The job becomes complicated when Ken finds himself in serious danger and becomes the target. The couple's wealth has attracted people who are prepared to be dangerous, and the man who has been hired to guard it is now in the way.

Alan Whiting wrote the episode and Derek Banham, who also directed Deadline, directs. Norman Bird plays Bob and Freda Dowie plays Eileen, and the cast includes Philip Martin Brown as Maurice, Pip Donaghy as Neville, Michael Turner as Lawrence Bird and Julia Negus as a receptionist. Neil Morrissey's Rocky, David Daker's Harry and Michael Elphick's Ken are all in it.

There is something fitting in the placing of the story late in the series. Ken has been through a long run of women who needed his help, from Bebe to Nina to Rebecca, and several of them have ended by breaking his heart. An older woman who has come into money is a new kind of client, and the story, with its title, seems to ask whether he can be trusted not to confuse his sympathy with something else.

IMDb users rate the episode a respectable 7.0, and a premise built on a lottery-style windfall is as relevant now as it was in 1992.

What the premise gives the final series is a gentle subject, a kind couple and their unexpected luck, for an episode in which the threat comes from people who want what they have. The pools win also puts Bob and Eileen in the same position as many of Ken's earlier clients, people who have something others want and no idea how to protect it, which is why they turn to a former fireman who advertised for anything legal.