Stamp Duty

Stamp Duty is a chase comedy built from a legal formality. Paul Booth is on trial in London for armed robbery, and the chief defence witness, who is also his alleged partner in the crime, Martin Mulholland, has disappeared. The defence team need him to give Booth a much-needed, entirely false alibi. The case is adjourned, and the senior partner on the defence team, Mrs Barratt, asks Harry to find Mulholland and serve him with a witness summons. He is expected to come to Nottingham, where his grandmother and his girlfriend, Naomi, live.

Ken and Harry are not the only people looking for him. Booth's estranged wife, Stella, and her large, brainless boyfriend, Dougie, want to find him too, because he has the proceeds of the robbery, £200,000. Stella does not mind that her husband goes to prison; she wants the money. Mulholland has used it to buy a set of rare stamps, which he has sent to his grandmother for safe-keeping until he can sell them to a local dealer, Edwin Brett, and launder the cash.

Ken tries to serve the summons by force and has the door slammed in his face. Harry has Laura lure Mulholland to his grandmother's house by pretending to be an old friend, and she casually hands him the summons as a present. CBS must still see him onto the train.

Stella and Dougie turn up at Naomi's flat, and Mulholland and Ken escape on Ken's motorbike. Mulholland demands protection, and Ken draws the short straw. Mulholland steals the bike and visits his grandmother for the stamps, but she says she has left them in her dressing gown, which is now in the washing machine. Ken and Rocky arrive, and so do Stella and Dougie, who kidnap all three at gunpoint. The prisoners escape from the car while the pair search a deserted farmhouse, but Ken and Rocky are still handcuffed together.

The next day's chase takes in Naomi's Jaguar, Stella's car, Laura's car and Harry's, a level crossing, a one-eyed blacksmith who removes the cuffs, and a haystack in which Dougie and Stella end up. Mulholland makes one more attempt to run and Naomi knocks him out with a shovel. Ken delivers him to Mrs Barratt at the station, and complains that Harry gave him such a tedious job. His grandmother finds the stamps in a vase and sells them herself to Brett, at a higher price than Mulholland had agreed.

Helen Slavin wrote the episode and Nicholas Laughland directs. James Nesbitt plays Mulholland, Camille Coduri plays Naomi, and Maureen Beattie and Ron Donachie are Stella and Dougie.

The strength is the handcuffs, which turn the pursuit into a running joke, and the final turn, in which the stamps were in a vase all along. The weakness is length: the chase goes on after the best of its jokes. It closes the series on a light note.