In Search of a Rose

Barney Meldrum's scheme to fill the village coffers involves fiberglass whales and a boat trip, and the phrase 'ends in disaster' doesn't begin to cover it. The whale-watching venture sinks, financially and probably literally, and a distraught Barney turns his suspicions on his own wife. The trip is meant to pull in the tourists, and Barney has staked the family pride on it, which is never a safe investment. Agnes, he decides, has been carrying on with Gavin Robb, the handsome newcomer who has just arrived in Lochdubh. Jealousy is the one business venture Barney has ever understood, and he throws himself into it.

But then a local man disappears, Lachie McCrae Jr. starts dredging up cattle cake from the seabed, and Hamish straps on a diving apparatus to see what the loch is hiding. What Lachie brings up looks like cattle cake, which is not a sentence anyone expects to write, and it points somewhere nobody wants to look. The episode moves from farce to something darker without changing gear awkwardly, which is the trick this show does best.

Stuart Hepburn wrote it, Mandie Fletcher directed, and it went out in March 1996. Stuart McGugan makes Barney's wounded pride genuinely funny rather than merely daft, and Barbara Rafferty's Agnes handles the accusation with the patience of a woman who has been married a long time. Alastair Mackenzie's Gavin Robb is handsome enough to be trouble. Robert Carlyle's Hamish does the diving, Anne Kristen appears as Miss Deidre Meikeljohn, with Anne Lacey, Ralph Riach, Valerie Gogan, Shirley Henderson and Stuart Davids filling out the village. The underwater scenes give the show one of its few proper set pieces, and the loch has never looked so forbidding.

The fiberglass whales are a detail you will not forget, and the case under the water gives the comedy some proper weight. It is one of those episodes people remember years later, mostly on account of the whales. It is Lochdubh at its best: a silly idea, a real mystery, and everyone involved in both.