Money Talks

Two strands run in parallel here and they touch directly: the restaurant's money trouble is what introduces the man who helps break the police case. Pie in the Sky is in debt and the Crabbes' new bank manager is unsympathetic. The kitchen is short-staffed, because Steve Turner and John have left, and the agency chef Margaret has hired is no good. Margaret learns that Henry has been hiding the bank's dunning letters and, doing the thing that most humiliates him, she closes the restaurant and dismisses the staff. Nicola is left helping to hold the place together. Henry's answer is characteristic: rather than argue the finances, he offers the bank manager a meal, cooking for him to demonstrate that Pie in the Sky is viable.

On the police side, Fisher has put Crabbe onto a surveillance operation on a pizza delivery business suspected of using its drivers to rob customers. Fisher thinks the operation is costing money for nothing and threatens to pull the plug on Crabbe's investigations unless he produces results fast. Henry's first choice of replacement chef, an out-of-work cook called Dermot, is no use; the man who works out is Gary Palmer, an ex-offender and recovering alcoholic. Gary solves both problems at once, because he can cook and he can read the pizza operation from the inside, having known the sort of men running it.

Henry also learns that Dudley Hooperman, the high-class thief whose escape opened the programme in Series 1 and who shot Crabbe in the leg, is dead. With Hooperman dead there is no case for Fisher to reopen, and so no blackmail, and Henry's hopes of early retirement come back to life. But a change in the rules on early retirement ties him to the force for three more years, and Crabbe then does his job too well. The car chase in which he catches the pizza gang is the kind of policing only he can do, and it leaves him too valuable to let go. Fisher's pressure, which seemed to be lifting, closes again, and the episode ends with retirement further away than it was at the start and Gary in the kitchen.

Nicholas Lamont's introduction as Gary is the episode's structural event. Gary is a version of Steve: an ex-criminal, a decent cook, a man being given a second chance by Crabbe, but played quieter and more watchful, and the difference in temperature matters because he has to last the rest of the run. Maggie Steed's Margaret gets the episode's hardest scene, closing the restaurant and sacking the staff, played as an act of care rather than punishment.

The episode is a reset and it says so structurally: a man reported dead, a blackmail dissolved, a new hire in the kitchen, and then the escape route shut again. The two strands are unusually well joined, with the bank's letters, the unfilled kitchen and Gary's ex-criminal competence the same problem seen from three sides. The tone is the series' usual comedy-drama with an argument underneath: a man who is good at a job he does not want is punished for being good at it. The comedy is in the bank manager being won over with a plate of food; the sting is in the pension rules.