The Tender Trap

The squad investigates corruption in local government running through a crooked land developer. Bulman and Willis search a country house without a warrant, and the search goes wrong: they narrowly escape a caretaker who comes after them with a shotgun, and they are caught breaking and entering. The illegal search is the incident the whole episode turns on, because it leaves the two officers exposed to a complaint and to the local force's displeasure, and it puts the squad on the wrong side of procedure rather than the criminals.

Bennett works a separate strand. She goes under cover as a music journalist to get close to a jazz musician, Richard Barkham, played by Simon Williams, who is billed as playing both Richard Barkham and Sir Lawrence Barkham. The twin casting is the plot: the musician Bennett cultivates has a twin brother who is the person actually behind the corruption. The same actor plays both men, so the episode's central deception is disclosed to the audience in the cast list as much as on screen, and Bennett's job is to work out which of the two she is dealing with and to get what she needs from the one who is not guilty.

The local police are drawn in through Sergeant Jill Tender, played by Rachel Davies, the officer who tries to lift the two men's spirits after the country-house debacle and in whom Willis develops a romantic interest. The title is built on her surname and on the baiting sense of a trap. Around the corruption sit the Mayor, played by Nigel Stock, a farm manager, Philip Franklin, Harry and a record producer. The resolution comes through Bennett's undercover approach, which produces the identification of the brother behind the corruption, and the land-development scheme is exposed and broken up with the damage from the unlawful search contained.

The twin casting is the episode's defining strength, because it ties the method, one face hiding another, directly to a plot about a respectable man fronting for a corrupt brother. Williams carries both the innocent and the guilty man on the same bill and the contrast between them is the story. Davies makes Sergeant Tender a working officer rather than a romantic prop, which matters because the title names her: she is competent at her job and the affection that grows between her and Willis is a by-product of the case rather than a distraction from it. Henderson and Blanch play the country-house sequence for comedy as much as tension, two middle-aged detectives fleeing a shotgun-wielding caretaker, and it is the episode's clearest demonstration of the series' willingness to make its own leads ridiculous. The guide singles out as its funniest moment the sequence in which Willis tries to help Sergeant Tender with her car repairs.

The honest weakness is that the two strands are unequal. The corruption case investigated by Bulman and Willis resolves largely off the back of Bennett's separate undercover work, so the lead pair spend much of the hour being caught out rather than detecting. What the episode does give the series is the woman officer in the decisive undercover role while the two senior detectives are sidelined by their own mistake, and it gives Willis a personal life, in however modest a form, which is the first of the season's small character developments sitting alongside the cases. It is also the first of the season's two Bruce Crowther scripts. The fan claim that the characterisation of Bulman here reaches back to The XYY Man, meaning a harder and more rule-bending figure than the softened eccentric of later Strangers, is recorded as a reading rather than as a production fact.