Fiddler Under the Roof

Fiddler Under the Roof turns a wedding into a test of who gets blamed. Harry has booked a big Irish Traveller wedding reception into the Coaching Inn, and he is not pleased when the guests arrive in caravans and tents, filling his grounds and blocking the roads. That is the comedy. The drama begins when the bride's father, James McGillivray, discovers who his new son-in-law is.

Sean Jones, the groom, is a police sergeant. For the McGillivrays, this is close to a betrayal, and the reception, already strained by Harry's parking problems, turns hostile.

Then the wedding presents are stolen. The police, without much hesitation, accuse two of the bride's brothers, Rory and Kevin, who have criminal records. The arrest makes Sean even less welcome among his wife's family, since it is his colleagues who have reached for the obvious suspects.

Ken sets out to prove the brothers innocent. The answer, in the end, comes from Rocky. He has been taking the wedding photographs, and his pictures catch the real thief: Aaron Wilson, an odd-job man working at the hotel. The family the police were quick to suspect are cleared.

There is a second, more farcical strand. Linda, on reception, becomes convinced that two brothers, Martin and Christopher Turnover, and their wives are up to something scandalous in the single room they are sharing, after she finds rubber suits and corsets there. The truth is dull. A booking mix-up left all four in one room, Martin has a bad back, and they are keen divers.

Douglas Watkinson wrote the script, his third for the series, and Sarah Hellings directs. Joe and Stephen McGann play the McGillivray brothers, with James Ellis as the bride's father and Michael Troughton as one of the Turnovers. The episode carries a dedication to George Morris, the former owner of Berrow Court, the house that stood in for the Coaching Inn.

The episode's strength is that its solution undoes its first assumption. The Travellers are the outsiders at the hotel, and the police assume that the theft is theirs. The real culprit is a member of Harry's own staff. Both plots, the theft and the Turnovers, are about people jumping to conclusions about guests they do not understand.

The weakness is that the episode also enjoys the same assumptions it corrects. The Traveller guests are introduced as a comic invasion, and the humour of caravans on the lawn sits uneasily beside a story that wants us to see the family fairly.

It is one of the most popular episodes of the second series with IMDb users, and it gives Rocky a rare moment as the one who cracks the case. The title, a play on Fiddler on the Roof, signals a wedding comedy, and that is what the episode mostly delivers, with an unexpected sense of fairness underneath.