Charity Begins at Home – Part 2

The second half of Charity Begins at Home starts with Harry's promise coming due. The bad publicity has brought the people the charity was supposed to help to the door of the Plaza Suite. A group of homeless men and women occupy the ballroom, led by a fiery Glaswegian named Sheba, and they will not leave until the money is paid back.

Ken goes looking for Richard Jay. He finds him living at a fairground in a large Winnebago, under his real name, Dick Jowett, close to his mother, who runs one of the stalls. After a chase through the fair, Jowett is cornered, and the truth is deflating. He has already spent or gambled away most of the money. Even the Winnebago is rented.

The second case belongs to Margaret. Her client, Jonathan Hillary, says he is being blackmailed with photographs of his wife and her lover. Margaret advises him to pay, and sends Ken and Rocky to follow the woman who collects the money. She turns out to be Hillary's wife, Lucinda, and the photographs show Hillary with his lover. Lucinda calls the payment a divorce settlement in place of alimony, and Margaret closes the case as a domestic matter.

At the end, Margaret tells Ken that his success as an investigator is not luck, and proposes a partnership. They form Boon-Daly Investigations, BDI, which they pronounce Beady Eye, and rent an office in the Plaza Suite. From here, the series has a detective agency at its centre.

Tony McHale wrote both parts and Baz Taylor directs again. Hywel Bennett returns as Jay, Maria Charles plays his mother, Oliver Tobias plays Hillary, and Annette Robertson plays Sheba.

The occupation of the ballroom is the strongest image in the two episodes. Boon is generally a comfortable programme, but here the beneficiaries of a charity fraud turn up in person, and Harry, who meant no harm and stood to make a profit, has to face them. It gives the comedy of his embarrassment a moral edge it rarely has elsewhere.

The resolution is honest and somewhat flat. Jay is caught, but the money is gone, and the episode lets its most pressing problem fade rather than solve it. The blackmail case, by contrast, is neatly turned, the supposed victim revealed as the guilty party and the blackmailer as a wronged wife.

What matters most is the partnership. Boon began as a story about a man taking odd jobs; with BDI he becomes a private investigator with a partner who has been a police officer, and the DVDCompare review of the series describes the agency taking on roles from minder to investigator of stolen sheep. This is the episode where that version of the programme begins.