Never Say Trevor Again

Never Say Trevor Again juggles three stories, and only one of them is a proper crime. The first is pure farce. Ken has been hired to serve a writ on Charles Henry Marquis, a slippery rogue in the window-dressing business, who keeps escaping him. He gives Ken the slip at a wedding-dress shop, and again on his way to a fancy-dress party dressed as a bear, before Ken finally pins him down with a piece of subterfuge.

The second belongs to Margaret. She is installing a security system at the large house of Don Pettifer, a criminal she knew well during her years in the police, and when she sees other villains arriving there, she is sure something is being planned.

The suspicion grows. One of Pettifer's two gardeners, Ray, decides to leave because he is tired of being hit by Pettifer's minder. As he goes to hand in his notice, he sees Pettifer handing round large sums of cash. He tells Margaret, drives off and is not seen again. The other gardener, Trevor, starts to worry.

The police have been watching the house for months, and two detectives, DC Pelham and DS Merrison, ask Margaret to plant a listening device. She does, but Pettifer sees her doing it on one of the CCTV monitors she has fitted for him. Forewarned, he and his wife spend the evening chatting about the local charity fete while the police listen in vain.

The third story is Harry's. A former fire-brigade colleague, Jim Hargreaves, now religious, asks to hire the Plaza Suite at a discount for an event in aid of the League of Absent Friends. Harry assumes a spiritualist meeting. It is an illegal boxing match. Trevor, by now working for Harry, helps the scheme along by setting Harry up on a date with his own mother, Renata, played by Rula Lenska, to get him out of the building.

Then the plots knot. Ray, the missing gardener, turns up at Renata's and Harry sees the two of them in an embrace. They want to run away together and do not know how to tell Trevor, Ray's best friend and Renata's son. Harry offers to break the news, and discovers that Trevor already knows and has been wondering how to tell them.

Douglas Watkinson wrote the episode and Alex Kirby directs. The guest list includes Hugh Paddick as Pettifer and the musician Zoot Money as Marquis, and the episode introduces Jamie Roberts as DC Pelham. It also tells the audience something new about Ken: his middle name, revealed in the course of the writ business, is Winstanley.

The best idea is the bug. A surveillance system Margaret has installed is used to catch her installing surveillance, and the crook turns the police operation into an evening of small talk. The weakness is that the episode has too much to do. The Pettifer case is left without a resolution, overtaken by romance and farce, and the title points to Trevor's family story rather than to the crime. As a comedy of crossed purposes it works; as a detective story it stops short.