Season 06 Episode 01

The vicarage household and the Keatings take a summer holiday together at Merries Holiday Camp. Will Davenport, Leonard Finch, Daniel Marlowe, Mrs Chapman, her husband Jack, Geordie Keating, Cathy Keating and the Keating children are all there. Will is the only one without a partner, and the others press him to find someone. The camp is run by Roy Reeves, a compère who tells jokes about his wife Babs and who stages a nightly variety bill with the Merries House Band.

Among the regulars are Sid and Margie Danker, a couple married two years who keep returning to the camp. On the night Roy calls them up to mark their anniversary and gives Margie a ring, she becomes distressed and flees the stage. Roy then collapses and dies. A local officer, DC Gerry Wicks, treats it as natural death from a bad heart, but Geordie notices soil on Roy's shoes suggesting he was dragged and finds a bottle of lidocaine. Roy had a slipped disc, and the drug was his own.

The camp photographer, Bryan Stanford, is one of the entertainments staff. He befriends Leonard over a shared interest in the travel writing of Maxim Gorki and later tries to kiss him; Leonard refuses. Will and Geordie find cinefilm, and an envelope addressed to Margie containing photographs of her with male guests. Roy had been using her to entrap and blackmail the guests. Sid admits he came back to the camp to humiliate Roy, who had once tried to ruin him, and says he got the girl and the happy ending instead. Margie is shown a film of herself dancing with a guest, and says she thought about killing Roy many times. Will is drawn into a short romance with the entertainer Sunny West, whose real name is Pamela Smith. She shows him a film of herself with Roy and says he had promised to destroy it. Geordie suspects her, Will apologises for the accusation, and she kisses him.

The solution is that the poison was meant for Sid. Margie had put lidocaine into Sid's stout, and Roy picked up Sid's glass and drank it. She went back out that night, she says, because she needed to get rid of the vial, dragged Roy's body into the ballroom and left the vial on him, and knew when she saw him that she had killed the wrong man. She says Sid brought her back to Merries to score points, made her feel worthless and never gave her love.

Two threads run alongside. Bryan Stanford sees Leonard and Daniel in bed together and demands that Will act, Will refuses to act on it, and Bryan photographs Leonard wiping ice cream from Daniel's mouth. The last shot of the episode is Bryan developing the photographs. Leonard and Daniel, meanwhile, discuss how little of themselves they can show in public, and Leonard says he cannot bear that they can never hold hands.

The episode is the lightest and the cruellest of Series 6, because a holiday camp variety bill is the setting for a murder in which the wrong man died and a photographer quietly building a file on a curate. The lidocaine is the detail that makes the case, and the soil on the shoes is the observation that opens it, since a man who has had a heart attack has not been dragged across a yard. The scene where Margie says she knew she had killed the wrong man is the best writing in the episode, and Bryan's last frame of film is the series' cleanest statement that the danger to Leonard is not in the case but in the parish.