Credit Where It's Due

Credit Where It's Due opens with an explosion and ends with a painting, and almost everyone in between is pretending to be someone else. Ken and Rocky are delivering packages of chemicals to two Irishmen, Norman and Barry, on a farm out in the country. Rocky has read a warning in the paper about terrorists in Birmingham, and he puts two and two together.

He calls the bomb squad. They blow up one of his panniers, Rocky having just had time to rescue his bike, and the street is showered not with debris but with fake credit cards. Norman and Barry are not bombers. They are forgers.

At the hotel, Harry has hired an artist, Davida Duff, to paint a picture of the Coaching Inn. Ken has doubts about her from the start, and Harry will not hear them. Over dinner she borrows his American Express card, and copies it. The two plots meet when the police, investigating the forgery ring, arrest Norman, Barry and Davida together.

Debbie, meanwhile, has fallen hard for the hotel's new French chef, Maurice, who asks her to marry him. The police arrest him too, for bigamy, after a string of similar engagements. He is not even French. His real name is Billy Clutterbuck, and he comes from Wolverhampton.

There is a final joke at Harry's expense. When he unveils Davida's painting of his hotel, every figure she has painted at the windows is naked.

Roy Mitchell's script, directed by Alex Kirby, is built on a single idea repeated three ways: a forger who poses as an artist, a bigamist who poses as a chef, and a pair of Irishmen whom Rocky takes for something far worse than they are. It began the second half of the series, which returned after a seven-month gap in the autumn of 1987. Pamela Salem plays Davida, Jeff Rawle plays the chef, and the fan site's cast list includes Patrick Bergin as one of the detectives.

The episode is the highest-rated of the second series among IMDb users, and the reason is plain: it is tightly plotted and every strand pays off with a reversal. Harry's reluctance to listen to Ken about Davida is a pattern the series uses well, because Harry's trust in charming strangers is both his weakness and the source of his generosity.

The weakness is the bomb scare. Birmingham had real cause to fear IRA bombs, and building a farce on Rocky's mistake, with the bomb squad detonating a pannier of credit cards, is a choice that has not worn well. The episode takes care to make the Irishmen criminals of another kind, but the joke depends on a suspicion that was not funny in the city where the episode is set.

As a comedy of impostors, though, it is one of the best-constructed episodes of the early run, and the unmasking of Debbie's chef as a man from Wolverhampton is its neatest joke.