One Wink Plot
A sixth-former turns up at Lovejoy's barn with a folio of eighteenth-century erotica to sell. Lovejoy is at his daughter's parents' day, six months behind on the fees, and the two problems turn out to be the same problem.
Review
Been a low-key week. The Bayeux Tapestry has arrived (apparently it is an embroidery really) and I'm off to see it in a couple of weeks. There are some racy scenes of nudity in it — the famous Ælfgyva section — and somebody has been the whole seventy metres with a magnifying glass and counted ninety-three penises, eighty-eight of which belong to horses. Another historian has since claimed a ninety-fourth. That is the sort of scholarship I can get behind.
All of which leads on nicely to this week's episode. The seedy and only half-enjoyable Sugar and Spice — and the only episode of Lovejoy where that observation would make the slightest sense.
Lovejoy does a Benny Hill episode. Think I just about prefer Lovejoy doing a Benny Hill to Bond. Just.
There is a bit of a dip in Series Two at this point, and Sugar and Spice is just a meh episode. It all feels a bit seedy.
It has some good ingredients but doesn't quite come together. It's like my attempt at a beef Wellington.
The good ingredients are all at the front. We open at Badenside, the girls' school where Lovejoy's daughter Vicky is a pupil and where Lovejoy is six months behind on the fees. We have been here before — Vicky turned up in Friends, Romans and Enemies and made a decent fist of teaching her father some Roman history — but this is the first time we get the whole set. Wife, daughter and school, all in one marquee.
Miriam dies on the verge in the opening seconds, which is how Lady Jane ends up driving. "Brains, beauty and a working car. What more does a person need?"
On the car in the school car park the tax disc says 28/2/91. I mentioned tax discs in Montezuma's Revenge. I might be obsessed.
The marquee is the best thing in the hour. Susan is there, which Lovejoy had confidently predicted she wouldn't be, on the grounds that in eleven years of marriage she never once went to a parents' day. She has brought a client, Cyril Harrington-Morse, who makes sofabeds and has a slogan he'd like everybody to hear. Jane is introduced as Lovejoy's landlady, twice.
Then Harrington-Morse asks what Lovejoy does for a living, and it's Vicky who answers. Six months in the nick, as a rule. Her own father, dropped in it by a snarky aside from his schoolgirl daughter, in front of her mother's biggest client — who plainly hasn't been listening, and asks what he sleeps on. Susan wants to know what on earth made her say it. "It's true, isn't it?" And Lovejoy, to his credit, backs the girl: of course it's true, and if it wasn't he wouldn't want her lying about it.
Susan, later, on Harrington-Morse: "The man manufactures sofabeds, why did he have to marry one?"
Then Khadija Subhani turns up at Lovejoy's barn with a folio of Fuseli prints, and the episode goes to London and largely stays there. There is not enough Suffolk in the second half.
What London gives us is an auction, and the auction gives us Lot 68, My Adonis, sold for £50 to the gentleman in the beret. This is Eric. He spends the rest of the scene working out that he can never take it home.
The auction rooms are Phillips, which is a real firm — founded in 1796 by Harry Phillips, who had been a clerk to James Christie before going out on his own — and which sits in Blenstock House on Blenheim Street, just off New Bond Street. Which is Mayfair. Two minutes earlier Lovejoy has told a taxi driver to take him to Berwick Street, which is Soho, about fifteen minutes away on foot. You can see why they wanted Berwick Street in the dialogue.
Taffy Griffiths is the fence, and insists he is an honest trader. In this episode he's like a Welsh Peter Stringfellow.
We then get some odd sections with a suburban stakeout of a brothel, which is where the blackmailing pharmacist turns up again later, and none of it is as interesting as the episode thinks.
It's nice when we return to Suffolk. The garden scene drinking whisky at Jane's place is tranquil and it's the only time in the back half that anybody relaxes.
Good to see Eric in his Lazer crash helmet again — third outing now, after Just Desserts and Who Dares Sings. Incredibly, the crash helmet is part of the storyline this time: it frightens the school receptionist, who is then further startled by the smutty pictures he's delivering.
I also feel like Eric's 'Lovejoy Antiques' emblazoned sidecar doesn't get enough love. He uses it to transport Mon Mothma around. From X-wing to sidecar in the space of eight years. Quite a fall.
Because that is who Miss Hemmingway is. She protects the school like Mon Mothma protects the Rebel Alliance. What's odd is that Lovejoy's wife looks like the actress who plays the more recent version of Mon Mothma. I mention all this because the rest of the episode isn't that engaging.
It turns out Hemmingway owns the folio all along, and she expels Lovejoy's daughter. This seems like good news to his daughter, and I suppose it's good news for Lovejoy too, given he's struggling to pay.
Anyway, this is all about hiding a schoolgirl pregnancy and being blackmailed over it — again, all very seedy. The chemist did a test for Vicky's schoolfriend's older sister two years ago, kept the result, and has been selling it back to her ever since, now that she's marrying into a family who would mind.
I guess it is nice to see the whole Lovejoy clan working together for a whole episode. But part of the joy, as it were, of Lovejoy is when the gang are together, in Suffolk, and not bogged down by family relationships. There's no Tinker in this one at all, which doesn't help.
The final scene is the Adonis, with a comically large appendage, handed over to Susan as a present. Again, all very odd.
Favourite Moment
The refreshment tent. Lovejoy, Jane, Susan, Vicky and the Harrington-Morses all in one marquee, every relationship in Lovejoy's life rubbing up against every other one, and his daughter taking the opportunity to volunteer his prison record to a paying client.
Good Quote
"Janey, how would you like to buy an enormous collection of stolen pornography?"
Guest Focus — Caroline Blakiston
Miss Hemmingway is Caroline Blakiston, and yes, she really is Mon Mothma. Ninety seconds of screen time in Return of the Jedi in 1983, briefing the fleet on the second Death Star, and a character who has since been handed several seasons of prestige television of her own — played by Genevieve O'Reilly, who is the more recent one.
The rest of the CV is longer and less quotable. RADA in 1957, straight into the Bristol Old Vic, Marjorie Ferrar in the BBC's The Forsyte Saga in 1967, three Avengers episodes, the usual ITC rounds, then Bernadette Borsodi in Brass. She joined the RSC properly in 1993, two years after this, and a later generation knows her as Aunt Agatha in Poldark.
She's the right casting. Hemmingway has to be a snob, a liar, a woman protecting an institution at a child's expense, and the person who eventually sorts it out, and Blakiston does all four without softening any of them. The moment she works out that Lovejoy is trying to sell her back her own pornography is the best thing she gets, and she does it almost entirely with a pause.
The Divvy Verdict
A 3. Not a fan.
Star Wars crossed with Benny Hill and a bit of antiques, and I'm not sure what happened here. The first ten minutes are good — the school, the marquee, the whole family in one place for once — and then it goes to London, finds a chemist blackmailing a teenager over a pregnancy, and tries to play it alongside jokes about dirty pictures and a statue with a comically large appendage. The two don't sit together.
It also proves the thing the good episodes keep proving by accident. Lovejoy works when the gang are together in Suffolk with an antique and a deadline. Give it a family, a London auction house and a suburban stakeout, and the whole thing goes flat.
Good ingredients. Beef Wellington.
And say this for the Bayeux Tapestry: it keeps the naked men down in the border and lets the invasion get on with itself above them. This one puts the rude bits in the middle and leaves the story to fend for itself round the edges. Nine hundred years between them, and only one has worked out where to put things.