All the Sad Songs

"All the Sad Songs" is the eighth series' most melancholy hour — a story about a washed-up singer, a forged-note case and the sad music of the cabaret circuit. It begins at the race track, where Bergerac, Willy and Ben are looking into forged notes. The trail leads to Tony Hubbard, a singer who was once half of a famous double act with Dawn Gray — the two of them were a singing duo in the early sixties, and nearly married until his womanising ways and her desire for children pulled them apart. Tony is now a hungover has-been playing the Golden Peacock, a seedy club where the star act is a comedian and the bill is made up of young hopefuls and washed-out names.

Paul Nicholas plays Tony with a heartbreaking, blustering denial — a man who cannot stop performing, even to himself. Rod Beacham's script, directed by Tim Fywell, is built around the reunion: Dawn, now married to the jealous Nick Wolfe, and Hungerford arrange an outing to see Tony's act, and when the old song I Remember Yesterday goes down well, the suggestion of a comeback tour hangs in the air. Sally Dexter's Dawn, watching the man she nearly married fall apart, is the episode's quiet centre.

The crime is the counterpoint. The forged notes came from the Golden Peacock, and the safe in the club owner's office holds chocolate and a gun. Tony, stumbling onto the secret, is found dead with a gunshot wound to the head — the angle consistent with suicide, but no weapon, and the place ransacked. The episode refuses the easy answer, and the investigation works its way through the club's world — the aspiring singer Suzy, the keyboard player Aziz, the comedian's agent — to the truth.

The resolution is bleak and human. The forgery case and the death resolve into the same sad story: a man who could not stop his own decline, and the people around him who profited from it. The series does not sentimentalise Tony — his pass at Suzy, his drinking, his cruelty — but it lets his tragedy be real. The title, all the sad songs, is the point: the cabaret circuit is full of them, and Tony Hubbard was one.

It is a gloomy, well-acted hour that shows the eighth series could do showbiz melancholy as readily as procedure. Nicholas and Dexter give it genuine pathos, and the club setting — the dressing rooms, the empty bottles, the audiences who remember — is captured with a sad, exact eye. A strong entry, and a reminder that the series' best stories were often the ones with music in them.