The Axeman Cometh

At Charlie Gimbert's auction, Lovejoy walks away with a Welsh oak dresser for well below what it is worth. Bargains in this show rarely stay bargains. Eric finds a door stuck shut, and behind it sits a rich Arab head-dress, festooned with gold ducats.

The trouble has a name: Catesby. Recently out of prison, the son of the dead man whose estate went under Gimbert's hammer, he claims the dresser was promised to him years ago. Lovejoy sells it back to him and politely leaves the head-dress out of the deal. Catesby does not take the omission well. He takes to looking for Lovejoy armed with an axe, and he is in good company, because one of Her Majesty's Inland Revenue officers has also taken an interest. The taxman keeps a longer memory than the ex-con. The title puns on Eugene O'Neill's The Iceman Cometh, and trouble arrives in the same spirit: once as a man with an axe, once as a man with a tax demand. It went out on 17 January 1986, a week after the series began.

Ian La Frenais, Jonathan Gash and Terry Hodgkinson wrote it, Roger Tucker directed. Ian McShane is Lovejoy, Phyllis Logan is Lady Jane Felsham, and Dudley Sutton's Tinker Dill puts in a welcome appearance. Malcolm Tierney's Charlie Gimbert presides over the auction where the whole business starts, and Chris Jury is Eric Catchpole. The rest of the company includes Yves-Marie Maurin as Vial, Oliver Cotton as Frobel, Zienia Merton as Miss Taylor, Stewart Harwood as Catesby, and Geoffrey Bateman as Dandy Jack.

There is real menace under the furniture talk. A dresser that nearly costs a man his head, a widow's son nursing an old promise, and Lovejoy in the middle of it with his usual cheerful grasp of the wrong end of the stick. In this trade, the heaviest secrets travel inside the most innocent-looking oak.