The Mild Bunch

The man who shot PC Ian Lefebvre and put him in a wheelchair is due for release from prison. Fisher's problem is what to do with Lefebvre on the day it happens: the officer is embittered, armed with a gun and waiting for the release, and Fisher wants him somewhere else and occupied. He teams him with Crabbe and sends them both after two elderly con-women.

Harriet and Florence Coverly run cheque fraud. They work as a pair, flattering their way into the confidence of shopkeepers and small businesses, and they leave every victim something in return: a perfect bread-and-butter pudding. The pudding is their signature and, for Crabbe, the reason to be interested. The Wikipedia summary of the episode singles out the use of Dundee marmalade in the pudding as the detail that motivates Henry to find them and, in effect, to obtain the recipe.

Crabbe's task has three parts: to give the embittered Lefebvre his self-respect back, to catch the Coverly sisters, and to get their recipe. The fraud trail runs through shops, post offices and a car showroom, and the sisters are supported by their nephew Jack and a wider network. Crabbe identifies their method — approaching victims as customers, paying with a cheque for more than the purchase, taking the difference in cash and moving on before the cheque clears — and the fraud is exposed.

The more important outcome is Lefebvre. The episode's stated danger is not the sisters but a wheelchair-bound policeman with a gun, and the resolution of that is Crabbe's achievement: Lefebvre is steered away from the man who shot him and towards a use for himself that is not revenge. The recipe is obtained, which is the joke the episode has been building to, and the pudding is served at Pie in the Sky.

Con O'Neill's Lefebvre is the guest performance that makes the episode work. The character is introduced as a threat rather than as a victim, and the episode has to move him from that to something else within the running time; the recovery is credible because it comes from work rather than consolation. Joan Sims and Edwina Day play the sisters as a double act, with Harriet the dominating partner and Florence the accomplice, and the comedy of their scenes is in the gap between their appearance and their business.

The title is a pun on the film The Wild Bunch applied to two elderly women, and it is the one Series 2 title that is not primarily a food pun, though the pudding supplies the food. The episode is a caper rather than a mystery, and Crabbe's interest in the recipe is treated as a legitimate professional motive. Its theme is what a person is for after an injury that has ended their working life, and its position is that Lefebvre is worth more than his grievance. The episode is the clearest example of the season of Crabbe as a manager of people: given a damaged officer to mind and a recipe to procure, he accomplishes both by the same method, taking the task seriously and the status of the participants lightly. It is also the first of Danny Hiller's two Series 2 episodes and the one where the kitchen staff carry the restaurant strand without Margaret.