One Wink Plot
Lovejoy flees to Norwich to escape an angry builder, only to uncover a fake painting, a fake antiques empire and a fake businessman. Thankfully, he's the real thing.
Review
There's something rather fitting about watching The Real Thing during a World Cup. As I write this, Brazil are taking on Japan in the 2026 tournament. Forty years earlier, when this episode first aired, football fans were counting down to Mexico '86 and Diego Maradona's Hand of God. Meanwhile, in East Anglia, Lovejoy was stealing spiral staircases, annoying Charlie Gimbert and exposing counterfeit antiques. History has room for both.
After the rather pedestrian To Sleep No More, this is exactly the sort of bounce-back Series One needed. Better still, it ventures beyond Lovejoy's familiar Suffolk stomping grounds and heads north. Well... Norwich. Which introduces us to Lovejoy's answer to the King of the North: Tony Palmer.
The opening is superb. Lady Jane is still waiting for the wrought-iron spiral staircase Lovejoy promised her, prompting one of their sweetest exchanges to date. Lovejoy solves the problem in the only way he knows how: by relieving Charlie Gimbert of the very staircase he'd already bought. Strapped to the roof of the Volvo, it looks barely tall enough to reach a windowsill in a bungalow.
It also gives Lovejoy two perfectly good reasons to disappear to Norwich. Firstly, there's yet another irate builder threatening to flatten him. Secondly, Lady Jane just happens to have a place to stay while helping furnish Tony Palmer's ambitious new antiques market. A paid job, free accommodation and several counties between yourself and an angry customer? Even Lovejoy couldn't argue with that.
The biggest criticism of The Real Thing is also one of its greatest strengths. It contains two genuinely good episodes that have been squeezed into one.
The first follows a wonderfully simple painting scam. A retired army officer and his accomplice persuade a kindly shopkeeper that he has stumbled across a priceless George Vincent. The poor fellow — who looks like cricket's Bumble — is only conned because he thinks he's about to con the owner himself. It's a beautifully observed confidence trick and, whisper it quietly, probably a stronger story than anything we got in last week's To Sleep No More.
Running alongside it is Tony Palmer's glamorous vision for a new Norwich antiques market. I rather like Tony. He's charming, enthusiastic and possesses the effortless confidence of someone who's never once doubted a word coming out of his own mouth. He doesn't initially feel like a villain at all. In many ways he's Lovejoy's mirror image: another charismatic rogue with a gift for selling dreams.
Lovejoy, however, is suspicious from the outset. Not because of any evidence, but because the whole thing simply doesn't feel right. It's the same instinct that tells him when a painting is fake. Palmer has the rented Rolls-Royce, the expensive lunches, the glossy brochures and the salesman's patter, but Lovejoy can sense he isn't the real thing.
Mind you, Palmer also commits the cardinal sin of expecting Lovejoy to hold down something resembling a proper job. Watching Lovejoy recoil at business plans, dealer recruitment and salaried employment is reassuring to this slacker. You just know he'd last about three days in a nine-to-five. I rather admire that, having spent thirty years doing jobs that interested me about as much as Tony's interest in Art Deco.
Early on, Lovejoy buys twenty cigarettes and a box of matches for the princely sum of £1.41. A few scenes later Tony offers him £250 a week to work for him. By my entirely unqualified Benson & Hedges inflation calculator, that's roughly £3,500 a week in 2026 money.
Norwich itself looks magnificent. I've never been, but after watching Lovejoy cruise around in that glorious red Roller, I rather feel I should. The change of scenery freshens everything up after six weeks of the same villages, pubs and auction rooms.
The comic centrepiece is undoubtedly Antiques Treasure Trail, the BBC's paper-thin disguise for Antiques Roadshow. I'm still not entirely convinced why Charlie Gimbert suddenly qualifies as an antiques expert, or why the BBC invented a fake version of one of its own programmes, but watching Charlie gradually unravel on camera while Lovejoy quietly rigs proceedings is enjoyable fluff.
Pleasingly, Lovejoy never abandons one mystery for the other. While exposing Palmer's fake empire, he also finds time to orchestrate an elaborate counter-con to recover the shopkeeper's money. The mechanics are almost too complicated to summarise, but they bring Tinker and Eric back into the fold and remind us that Lovejoy is always at its best when the whole gang are involved.
Poor Dandy Jack, however, continues to drift through Series One like a man who wandered onto the wrong set. Geoffrey Bateman is always good value, but here Dandy appears for little more than two minutes, confirms that the George Vincent is fake and quietly disappears again. After briefly defending him over the last couple of episodes, I'm afraid this outing vindicates my original comparison. Dandy Jack increasingly feels like Lovejoy's Jar Jar Binks — never actively annoying, but a character the writers seem quietly unsure what to do with. A shame, because Bateman deserved more than becoming East Anglia's most overqualified fact-checker.
By the end, Tony Palmer's charm finally curdles. The one-year lease, the rented Rolls-Royce, the fake confidence and poor Pierre from Lebanon all reveal a man who wasn't building an antiques market at all — he was building an illusion. The title suddenly makes perfect sense. Almost nothing in the episode is "the real thing". Not the George Vincent. Not Palmer's business. Not the lease. Even the Dufy is copied. The only thing that's consistently genuine is Lovejoy's love of the game.
Yep, the episode is overstuffed. Either storyline could comfortably have carried an hour on its own. But unlike To Sleep No More, which suffered because its central mystery couldn't sustain the running time, The Real Thing has the opposite problem. It simply has too many good ideas. That's a much nicer complaint to have.
Favourite Moment
Charlie Gimbert being spectacularly stitched up on Antiques Treasure Trail. Petty, childish and utterly deserved.
Good Quote
"You don't know the difference between a Fabergé and a French fry."
One of Lovejoy's sharpest put-downs, and a line that probably tells us everything we need to know about Tony Palmer's antiques expertise.
Guest Focus — Geoffrey Bateman
Geoffrey Bateman once again appears as Dandy Jack, forever one of British television's most familiar faces. Many viewers will remember him as James Hooper ("Hooperman") in This Life, but here he's given precious little to do beyond confirming a fake painting is, well... fake. Dandy Jack has gradually won me over during the first series, but this feels like another reminder that the writers never quite knew how to use him.
The Divvy Verdict
A busy, witty and thoroughly entertaining return to form. Norwich provides a welcome change of scenery, Tony Palmer is a charismatic foil for Lovejoy, and both the painting con and fake antiques market are entertaining enough to have starred in episodes of their own. Four stars, but only because it tries to squeeze two very good episodes into one.