Paper Mafia

Paper Mafia runs two stories about false fronts, and only one of them is played for laughs. In the comic one, Rocky takes a job delivering pizzas for Giovanni's restaurant and falls for the owner's daughter, Guiseppina. He also finds himself in the middle of a vicious feud with a rival Italian establishment run by Vito Rossi, and jokes that Giovanni's place is so well fortified it must have mafia connections.

The serious story concerns Harry's spare ticket. He is off to a licensed victuallers' conference in America and wants to sell the second seat. Two guests at the Coaching Inn, Wyman and Franklyn, buy it. They then ask Ken to run a series of errands for them, including collecting a new passport and the visas to go with it.

Ken does not know that Wyman has just escaped from prison, or that the errands he is running are building a new identity for a fugitive. It is the second time in the series, after the canal boat in the first, that his willingness to take on any job has made him an accomplice.

When the two men realise that Ken has seen the false name on the new passport, and could tell the police, they change their plans. They break into Harry's safe, take his passport, and leave the country. Wyman flies out as Harry Crawford.

Tony McHale, who went on to create Holby City, wrote the script, and Ken Hannam directs. Georgia Slowe plays Guiseppina, John Bennett plays her father, and Constantine Gregory and David Simeon play the two guests.

The ending is unusual for the series. Boon generally allowed Ken to put things right by the final scene, and here the criminals get clean away, using the identity of the man whose hotel they have been staying in. The joke is on Harry, but it is a joke with a cost: a fugitive is abroad under his name.

The title brings the two plots together. The mafia of Rocky's joke is paper-thin, a pair of feuding restaurateurs, and the real organised crime of the episode is a matter of documents, paper that turns one man into another.

The pizza feud is the weaker strand. It trades in broad Italian stereotypes and is there to give Rocky a romance, and the episode's interest lies elsewhere. The passport plot is one of the cleverer pieces of plotting in the second series, because it makes Ken's ordinary courier work the means of the crime, and because the payoff, Harry's name travelling abroad without him, is unexpected.

IMDb users rate it among the better episodes of the series. It is also a useful reminder that the programme's lightness did not mean that every story had a happy ending.