One Reborn Every Minute

One Reborn Every Minute takes Ken and Margaret into the business of faith. The Rev Jedediah Marshall, an American evangelist, is holding healing meetings at the Plaza Suite, in which he picks people from the audience, apparently at random, and cures them. His meetings are being sabotaged, first by hecklers and then by a strippergram, and he hires BDI to find out who is responsible.

He has a theory. He and another preacher are competing for a religious slot on a new cable television channel, and he suspects a dirty-tricks campaign. The obvious suspect is Luke Hennessey, a preacher whom Jedediah had fired from a religious show in America and who now lives nearby. When Ken and Margaret call on him, they find Jedediah's wife, Jolene, there too. Both deny an affair, and Luke denies the pranks.

Harry, meanwhile, brings his Aunt Delia, who has severe arthritis, to one of the meetings. She is called to the front, Jedediah prays over her, and her pain disappears. Two days later it is back. Her doctor explains that her relief came from wanting to believe and from the body's own painkillers.

Rocky tracks down the stripper, who tells him that two Welshmen hired her. Ken then catches two men planting a stink bomb at the Plaza Suite and chases them to a chapel. They are Gareth and Owen Pritchard, brothers of the Welsh Baptist minister Cledwyn Pritchard, who is Jedediah's real rival for the television slot. The brothers have acted without his knowledge.

The second reversal comes at the next meeting. Ken, fiddling with a radio, picks up the voice of Jedediah's assistant, Lee, briefing the preacher through a hidden earpiece about the people in the audience and their ailments, which Lee has learned by chatting to them as they arrive. The miracle worker is a fraud, and Cledwyn gets the slot.

Kieran Prendiville wrote the script, and Laurence Moody directs, his first episode since the first series. Kristoffer Tabori plays Jedediah, and Joan Hickson, who has a page on this site, plays Delia.

The episode had an unusual transmission history. It was due to be shown on 27 December 1988 but was pulled at the last minute because it featured a gospel song, Gonna Go to Heaven on a 747, days after the Lockerbie bombing. It went out on 10 January 1989 with the song replaced.

The double reversal is the strength. The saboteurs turn out to be overzealous brothers rather than a cynical rival, and the client who hired the detectives turns out to be the real con man. Delia's brief relief and its return give the fraud a human cost.

The weakness is the Pritchard brothers, who are broad Welsh comic types, and a sabotage plot that is less interesting than the deceit it uncovers. IMDb users rate the episode low. But its target, faith healing sold for television ratings, was a sharp one for an ITV comedy-drama at the end of the 1980s.