One Wink Plot
An itinerant painter works his way round the thatched cottages of Suffolk, two hours a canvas. Lovejoy and Tinker go looking for him, and nobody comes out of it especially well.
Review
Spurs' first home game did not go well, so we will not dwell on that.
It is bank holiday Monday and the Reading and Leeds festivals have just ended. I saw an interview with some of the kids who go now, and they were asked what the oldest age to go should be. They answered twenty. Which has depressed me a bit.
More cheerful is that although Farage won at Clacton — I have been going on about that by-election since The Italian Venus, and Count Binface did not win it — he seems to have gone AWOL since, which is good news for all of my senses.
And talking of gullible, or perhaps more sensitively vulnerable, people being taken in by a huckster: we have this week's episode of Lovejoy. One Born Every Minute.
Wilkes is not in the despicable league of Farage and co, but he is just as focused on the con.
So this one revolves around an itinerant painter who goes around the Suffolk countryside sitting outside thatched cottages and painting them.
He focuses on the ones with pretty middle-aged women, to lure. The menopausal maestro.
Lovejoy's task is simple. A galloping Major and crew set him to find Ashley Wilkes. Lovejoy isn't sure why, but he knows the idea of a Wilkes painting for the mess hall is a load of tosh.
"Your skin has a lustre that you don't often see outside porcelain." With lines this cheesy, combined with the tatty, clichéd paintings, it is a miracle it works at all. One of his conquests reckons he could sell snow to Eskimos.
Eric isn't in this and neither is Janey. Gimbert, meanwhile, is still lost in the Upside Down between Series One and Series Four. So although the episode is situated nicely in the pubs and cottages of Suffolk and Essex — with a detour by Tinker to Braintree, home of the Prodigy, who had formed there the year before this went out — it is enjoyable but capped at a 4.
Lovejoy doesn't break the fourth wall vocally either, though we do get a knowing wink as he watches all the ladies Wilkes has romanced leave the pub in a hurry. I am still not sure what they are running for.
But it is a 4, because this is one of the episodes I remember clearly from before I started the re-review site.
Lovejoy. Who is he? The local peasantry.
Anyway. We get to watch him race around the countryside tracking down this Wilkes fellow in Miriam, and the countryside looks great, as do the pubs. Again.
He tracks down one lady who was seduced by Wilkes. Then a man whose wife was seduced, who says the affair revitalised his marriage. Very weird.
Then we get Wilkes in his barn, training up some other painters, Tinker among them. The attention settles on one much younger student, which sits oddly alongside everything else.
Wilkes has a long-suffering partner, Roz — well, two years' worth — and she has a go at explaining his allure to Lovejoy later on.
I have to say it is very hard to see what Wilkes's charm actually is. He comes across as a pillock. I do like the LA cap though.
We get another nice fish and chip scene — the last one was Friends, Romans and Enemies back in Series One — but this time it is just Lovejoy and Tinker, and it is cosy. I would happily be sat there with them, drinking white wine and eating fish.
Sit rep: the Major leaves a message on Lovejoy's answering machine. Incidentally, Answering Machine is the name I often use at pub quizzes. The kids don't get it.
There is a very odd, quite predatory scene in the pub where Wilkes and the landlord work through the local targets. Just about justifiable, in that it could be purely a financial exercise in working out who will buy a painting. Just about.
Tinker has found Wilkes by half time, so the chase continues on the premise that he is only at the art school at weekends, and that Lovejoy is only being paid by the Major for three days.
So we chase on, and that is a good thing. I watched Nolan's Odyssey at the BFI IMAX a couple of weeks ago and this is right up there — Lovejoy as Odysseus, the Major as Agamemnon, Wilkes as the siren. Maybe.
Eventually Lovejoy catches up with him at the Dun Cow in Basildon, and goes straight in with his theory: that Wilkes avoids the abstracts, which is the one place he has any real skill.
The secret of Wilkes's success, it turns out, is HRT. Good grief. Sauce for the goose and the gander. This may need dropping another point.
Wilkes agrees to meet the Major about the commission, with no idea who he is.
Then Lovejoy, Wilkes and Miriam drive back to what looks like Suffolk, and have the excruciating conversation about how this predator operates. That would have been about an hour in the car, so it is handy they saved it all until they had pulled up outside the barn.
If we ever needed Lovejoy to break the fourth wall, it was there. A little word to camera on how one ought to conduct oneself around the opposite sex. The government have just put out something similar for people arriving in the UK. I think Lovejoy could have delivered it better.
Anyway. Roz is the Major's ex-wife, and the Major has a phrase for Wilkes that is better than anything I could manage: bargain-basement Lothario.
The Major's two goons want to talk to Roz Chatfield. They slap Lovejoy about a bit, which is odd. "Stop threatening me. I scare easily." The slap seems to be enough — Roz goes to the barracks and Lovejoy gets paid.
I think I need to start doing a shout-out to one impressive piece of clothing in each episode. The winner here is Lovejoy's white jumper and 501s.
Then we get the Malaya business, which explains why getting Roz back mattered so much. Briefly: her late father was a brigadier who had removed documents from the Ministry of Defence. They concern a patrol from his regiment during the Malayan Emergency, at a village called Batang Kali — plantation workers taken prisoner and shot the following day, the official line being that they were trying to escape. Another officer who was there is now, as Roz puts it, a prominent citizen. Hence the goons, and hence the panic about tabloids.
Which is real, and worth saying plainly. On 11 and 12 December 1948 a Scots Guards patrol killed twenty-four unarmed villagers at Batang Kali in Selangor. The episode says twenty-five. "Shot while trying to escape" is close to the account the British government stuck to for decades; six of the soldiers confessed to the Metropolitan Police in 1970 and the investigation was stopped for reasons those involved called political. The families lost their final case in the UK courts in 2015. Quite a thing for a Sunday-night antiques comedy to reach for, and it gets the shape of the official lie right.
There is no comeuppance for Wilkes. He wins. His final scene is wooing the weathergirl.
The actual last scene is lovely, though. Tinker in the same baseball cap, painting a pub — but no £200 and no HRT-driven leg over for him. He will be getting free booze instead.
Then some slightly forced laughing, and out on a line from As You Like It.
Favourite Moment
The fish and chips. Lovejoy and Tinker, no plot being advanced, white wine out of the bottle, the pair of them working out what to do next and mostly not bothering.
There has not been one of these since Series One and the show is better for them. Two blokes eating chips is worth three car chases.
Good Quote
"Biggest load of cobblers I've heard in years."
Guest Focus — Tom Wilkinson
Ashley Wilkes is Tom Wilkinson, which in 1991 meant nothing to anybody. He had been at RADA and had done his time on stage — a West End Horatio in 1980 — but he was nearly fifty before The Full Monty in 1997 made his face familiar and won him a BAFTA. Two Oscar nominations followed, for In the Bedroom and Michael Clayton, plus a Golden Globe and an Emmy for playing Benjamin Franklin. He died in December 2023.
He is very good here, and the episode leans on it, because the part does not survive much scrutiny. Wilkes has to be charming enough that six women hand over £200 and rather more besides, and the script gives him cheese and a baseball cap to do it with. Wilkinson very nearly gets away with it.
The name is the joke, and the episode holds it back to the last act, then hands it to Tinker — who arrives at it by admitting he always falls asleep at the same point in Gone With The Wind, which is where Leslie Howard's Ashley Wilkes comes in. "Even his name's a lie."
The Divvy Verdict
A 4. It is one of the ones I remembered from before this project started, and watching it back most of it holds up — the countryside, the pubs, Miriam, and a proper double act with Tinker now that the cast has been stripped back to two.
What has not held up is the sexual politics. The episode is fond of Wilkes. He picks out women who are lonely or being ignored, paints their house for two hours, takes £200 and sleeps with them, and the programme treats it as roguish. The HRT speech spells the targeting out loud and is played for laughs. Deborah, who is the one who says it plainly, is angry with herself rather than with him — "I was old enough to know better" — which tells you where the script thinks the fault lies.
The best-treated woman in it is Alison Jukes, who runs an antique shop, declines to help Lovejoy at all and sends him to British Telecom. She comes off well precisely because she is not one of the conquests.
None of which stops it being a good hour. It just stops it being more than a 4.
And the title is doing more work than the episode realises. One born every minute — the mark, not the con man. Wilkes paints for two hours, takes the money, and walks off to find the next cottage with nobody laying a finger on him. Thirty-five years on, that still tracks.