The Tender Trap

In the weeks leading up to Christmas, Lawrence Drake, a rich ex-racing driver, asks Ken to watch his wife, Pamela, whom he suspects is having an affair. Lawrence feels that he has nothing to offer Pamela because he is now crippled after an accident on the racetrack.

Pamela and her boyfriend, Alex Cavendish, are robbed at gunpoint while driving home from a restaurant late at night. Pamela’s jewellery is stolen and she receives a blackmail request: “pay up and you’ll get the jewels back”. She starts to gamble heavily and tries to borrow money from loan sharks in order to raise the blackmail money.

Ken follows Pamela and sees her with her lover. He then gets Laura to visit Alex, posing as “Briony Carling”, a magazine researcher, and soon learns his name and that he is a wine importer. Later, Pamela sees Ken while he is following her again. She pleads with him not to tell Lawrence about Alex or the jewellery because she doesn’t want to hurt him.

Alex is in league with the thieves. At a wine-tasting, Harry and Laura discover that he is also selling off his wine stock very cheaply. When Pamela tells him that she intends to leave Lawrence and move in with him, he panics, realising that she will probably tell Lawrence everything, making him call the police. The jewel thieves break into the CBS offices, beat up Ken and warn him off. Ken reports back to Lawrence who admits that he knew all about Alex and the robbery, but wanted to convince Pamela what sort of man Alex really was and how easily he could be tempted to steal.

Pandora, a chirpy Liverpudlian teenager, asks Ken to trace her father who left her mother before she (Pandora) was born. All she has is a photograph of her father and her pregnant mother, clad in sheepskin coats. Rocky helps Pandora trace her grandmother, Mrs Whitfield, whom she has never met before. Mrs Whitfield takes Pandora to see her father who is now Managing Director of a frozen chicken company. He offers her a house, a job with the company and a holiday in Barbados, but she rejects him as being too middle-class and “a raging materialist”. She decides to go live with her grandmother.

Smudger, the landlord of The Drum (Ken and Harry’s local pub) is organising a Christmas party but Harry thinks that the plans are tasteless. He decides to organise his own party but then wonders if anyone apart from the CBS staff will come to it. Harry and Laura dress up in fur-lined Santa suits and Ken gets into the festive mood by donning a red nose. However none of Harry’s friends have turned up and the party is lifeless. He assumes that they are all at Smudger’s rival event, a Tarts and Vicars party. But out of the blue Smudger and his party turn up – they have taken pity on Harry.

Notes and episode list © Martin Underwood, 1999

Page last modified: 17 December 2008, 23:48