One Wink Plot
A solid gold Colombian king, a heavy metal band called Ded Lizards, and a blowpipe in Suffolk. The silliest hour Lovejoy has produced so far, and all the better for having the whole crew back to enjoy it.
Review
So the heatwave has broken and the Premier League is back. For the opening Saturday I went down to watch Whitstable first, an FA Cup preliminary round, which they won comfortably against Newhaven, 5-0. Then it was off to the pub for Spurs' first game of the season, away at Brentford. Spurs lost 3-0. Millions spent, and they looked like absolute tat.
Which brings me neatly to the main artefact in what is the silliest hour Lovejoy has produced across two series. The Aztec-ish gold raft that everybody spends Montezuma's Revenge chasing is meant to look priceless. It looks cheap. It looks like tat. Like Spurs.
Off to watch Spurs' first home game against Newcastle next Saturday — so I think I will review Who Dares Sings before I go, on the grounds that I could be a little grumpy come the Sunday.
After the reach of The Italian Venus and the beautifully small, rain-sodden Bin Diving, Series Two now swings the other way entirely and imports a poisoned dart assassin into East Anglia.
It should not work. It rolls along very nicely, because for the first time in a while everybody is present and correct — Tinker is back, and Janey gets amorous.
It opens with a dream sequence, which I suppose is another Dallas callback. Lovejoy is having a rather promising one about Lady Jane, interrupted at gone ten in the morning by Eric, who has something to show him.
What Eric has is a small solid gold figure obtained from a friend called Jason, a roadie with the heavy metal band Ded Lizards, and Eric has decided this is the moment to strike out on his own. "I can't be Lovejoy's second-in-command for the rest of me life."
"Can I have that in writing, Eric?" He has also been told the thing carries a curse.
The figurine is wrapped in a Melody Maker, and Eric is into heavy metal. In the early nineties the Melody Maker was all shoegaze — think Chapterhouse, Slowdive, Ride, My Bloody Valentine — and most definitely not hair metal, so I think the researcher or the props person got this one wrong.
I was an avid reader. Gutted when it folded and got 'merged' into the more mainstream and less good NME. Loved Melody Maker, I did. Even though it annoyed me by refusing to cover any rave music whatsoever. My missives on the subject did not help.
But Eric would definitely not have been reading it. That figure should have been wrapped in Kerrang!. If there is ever a reboot, I hope they get this sorted. Very important.
Anyway. Even if the prop department isn't paying attention, Tinker takes the curse business seriously enough, and there is nothing like an old curse to add a bob or two to the price.
Two people are then dead inside twenty minutes — this may or may not be Melody Maker related — so the curse is working.
The title says Montezuma, who was Aztec, in Mexico. Lovejoy, holding the figure, dates it to the fifteenth or sixteenth century and calls it Colombian, which is right. Later, describing the same object, he calls it a solid gold Inca statue, and the Inca were in Peru. That is three separate civilisations, several thousand miles apart. It doesn't really matter. This is all-round silly.
The only person who gets it right is Professor David Hayward, who takes Lovejoy to a museum in Cambridge and explains that every year at the winter solstice a king would be rowed out onto a lake on a raft and would throw gold offerings into the water — and that very occasionally a gold raft would be made and thrown in too. What Lovejoy has is the king off one of those.
Onto the rest of the plot. Eric takes the figure to a dealer for a second opinion and is politely turned over. He and Lovejoy are then bundled into a car by two heavies and delivered to a rehearsal room where Ded Lizards are grinding away at full volume. Ded Lizards is presumably meant as a playful Def Leppard reference — but unlike the Hothouse Flowers, who turn up as themselves next series in No Strings, and about whom I have an anecdote, so stay tuned, I assume the BBC couldn't afford the actual Def Leppard.
Jeff Diamond, their manager, explains that the statue is stolen, that he has kept the police out of it, and that he now wants shot of the thing entirely — because since it arrived his drummer Archie has been killed in a car crash and his bands have gone off the boil.
All very suspicious, but at least this isn't Janey getting the gang into a scrape.
Then comes the detail that possibly — well — justifies the entire episode. Archie had wanted to mount the figure on his dashboard. It would not fit with the raft attached, so he cut the king off, off a pre-Columbian votive offering, and stuck him down with a spot of superglue under each foot.
The cars are worth a look generally, because every windscreen in this episode has a tax disc in the corner of it. Little paper circle, perforated edge, sat in a plastic holder going slowly orange in the sun. They were killed off on 1 October 2014 and I miss them like I miss the Melody Maker.
Jason, meanwhile, turns up dead on Lovejoy's doorstep in a thunderstorm, killed by a dart from an air gun.
The Detective Inspector calls the weapon a blowpipe and notes that the poison acts almost instantly, and that ballistics reckon you need to be practically standing on top of someone to hit them with one at all — which is the episode quietly admitting it knows how daft this is and pressing on regardless.
What we actually see later is a pistol. Air powered. An air pistol. A killer air pistol. It also unlocked something I had entirely forgotten: air pistols and air rifles were everywhere back then, and darts were one of the things you could fire out of them. Point two two calibre. I think shotguns and air rifles were the sole reason I briefly joined the Young Farmers at school.
The statue goes to Nick Bellenger's for auction, into a glass case with unsmashable glass, electronic beams and a pressure sensor, all described by Nick with enormous pride. It is the least convincing security arrangement since the Popemobile, and it resembles the final bit of The Crystal Maze without the confetti. I think if Nick's safe had confetti swirling about in it like a snow globe it would have been considerably better, and might even have fended off a burglar by inducing confusion.
Lovejoy gets round it all later to steal back his own artefact, having memorised the code off a mirror. Not that he memorises the whole thing, mind — five actual numbers would clearly have been too much to ask, so we get "one, nine, three, now go diagonally" and Eric is left to work out the rest.
Next we are introduced to Rosita Lujemillo, a dealer who buys Colombian and Peruvian pieces to send home. Or so she says. By this point it matters little.
Then, apropos of nothing, some apostle spoons. Lovejoy sends Tinker to Ronnie Bassett with the phrase, Ronnie is having none of it, and then — "Apostle spoons." "Let him in, Frank." That is the whole gag and it works three times, because it is never once explained. Tinker asks outright, twice, and gets "Ronnie knows. That's all that matters." Eric repeats it without understanding it. Nobody tells the audience. So I looked it up.
Apostle spoons are real, and about as Lovejoy an object as exists. Silver, with the finial cast as one of the Twelve Apostles, each holding his own emblem so you can tell them apart. The ideal set runs to thirteen — the twelve plus a Master spoon of Christ himself — and in Tudor England a well-off godparent gave a set to a godchild at the christening, which is apparently where being born with a silver spoon in your mouth comes from.
Whatever happened between Lovejoy and Ronnie Bassett over a set of apostle spoons happened long before the credits rolled, and we are not being told about it. This is a programme that trusts you to accept that its hero has a past full of small debts and stranger favours, and it is much better for keeping most of them to itself.
Onto amorous Janey.
Alexander announces he is off to Paris on business. Jane, dropping Lovejoy at a hotel in Cambridge, watches her husband walk out of it. Not in Paris, then. She phones him that evening and he tells her he is going into a meeting at nine o'clock. Phyllis Logan plays it with barely a raised voice, and what follows is Jane becoming steadily, deliberately amorous with our mullet-haired hero.
Lovejoy hasn't the faintest idea what is happening to him. There is something different about her lately. It is just, erm, different. She is more friendly. And Jane, deadpan, tells him he has such a way with words. Then she asks whether he has ever thought about their relationship, tells him it is a funny sort of one for a man and a woman to have, listens to him insist that it isn't, and kisses him anyway. "I've always wanted to do that."
At which point the doorbell goes and in walks Rosita. Lovejoy's date for the evening.
Tinker and Eric spend this episode functioning as the world's least discreet contraception. Lovejoy gets Rosita to the point where the evening is going somewhere and Tinker arrives with news about a drummer's dashboard. Jane gets Lovejoy to the point where the morning is going somewhere and Eric arrives to say the police are on their way. Continuous coitus interruptus, in a barn, in Suffolk.
And Alexander was never in Paris. He was in Cambridge closing a secret takeover of Mrs Irene May's company, the Paris story was cover, and he is thoroughly delighted with himself. He calls it a bit Boy's Own. So Jane's suspicion was entirely unfounded, the kiss is still on the record, and the episode simply lets that sit there and moves on.
Favourite Moment
Rosita and Eric, alone. She tells him she finds him very attractive. Eric — who spent the first act announcing he was going to strike out on his own and has since been robbed, arrested by proxy, and left standing next to a corpse — cannot believe his luck. She asks him, very sweetly, if he would mind turning around for a moment, as there is just something she would like to do.
He turns around.
And as he comes round, Chris Jury raises his eyebrows, and for about a third of a second I was convinced he was going to look straight down the lens. He doesn't. He gets knocked out instead. But the eyebrows are there and I know what I saw.
Good Quote
"Are you Lovejoy?"
"Not necessarily."
Guest Focus — Roger Ashton-Griffiths
He is credited as Antique Shop Owner. He has one scene. Eric brings him the golden king, he holds it up to the light, says he will do some homework and get back to him — and then goes straight to the phone and dobs Eric in, which is what sets the whole plot moving.
I have picked him partly out of mischief. Last time out I said the two Hooray Henrys who wander in with a rhino horn would be cast today as third and fourth Targaryen from the left. A fortnight later an actual Tyrell turns up behind a counter in Suffolk. Roger Ashton-Griffiths is Lord Mace Tyrell in Game of Thrones, and if you have been anywhere near a screen since 1985 you have seen him without necessarily clocking him: Brazil, Young Sherlock Holmes, The Cook, the Thief, His Wife & Her Lover, A Knight's Tale, Gangs of New York, Mr. Turner.
He also started out singing with English National Opera at the Coliseum, and has since collected an MA in Fine Art and a PhD in Creative Writing from the University of East Anglia. Which makes him, comfortably, the best qualified person in this episode — including the professor who is the only one who knows what the gold raft actually is.
A word for that professor too, while we are here. John Stratton had been a familiar face since The Cruel Sea in 1953, played Captain Potter in Quatermass and the Pit, and was Shockeye in Doctor Who's The Two Doctors — a part that mostly involved wanting to eat people. Here he wants a gold raft badly enough to kill for it, so the range was consistent. He died in October 1991, nine months after this went out.
And in the smallest part of the lot, the hotel receptionist who tells Jane that her husband stayed the night with a lady is Jessica Carney — William Hartnell's granddaughter, and later the author of the only proper biography of him. The line runs about four seconds and it turns the entire Janey subplot.
The Divvy Verdict
Four and a half out of five for an hour of very enjoyable nonsense. Not sure I would point a Lovejoy newbie at this one and expect them to be convinced, but I like it a lot.
The title is wrong, the mythology is wrong a few times over and the murder weapon requires the assassin to be standing close enough to shake hands.
The final scrap comes with sound effects that would not have shamed Batman in 1966. And the motive, when it finally arrives, is... drugs.
Tinker told us in the first ten minutes: the curse is a sales technique, and underneath it there is only ever somebody wanting paying.
Then Rosita simply drives off with the lot.
But the crew is whole again, and that is what buys the extra half star. Bin Diving was a five with no Tinker in it and I said at the time I had no defence for that.
Here Tinker emerges from a spell shut in a cellar with the drink and is looking 'loose'.
Which seems to be taken from Porridge: The Movie, almost move for move. Fletcher and Godber. Tinker and Lovejoy.
It all ends with Alexander explaining about Paris and the entire lot of them heading off to celebrate, which is the correct ending for this episode and possibly for most episodes.
Rosita takes the gold home. The team look as happy as I have seen them. Hopefully the Spurs squad will look as euphoric come the end of the 2026/27 season.