The Judas Pair

A collector of duelling pistols is murdered for a valuable but incomplete set of Regency firearms, and Lovejoy happens to hold the missing pieces. That puts him squarely in the middle of the affair before anyone has even asked him anything. The wife and brother of the dead man engage him to find the pistols, on the sensible theory that whoever owns the complete pair is the murderer, or knows who is.

The hunt is a dangerous one. Lovejoy puts Jane's life at risk in the course of the recovery, and the whole business builds towards him challenging Dr La Grange to a duel. A duel in the 1980s, over a pair of flintlocks from the 1820s: the show knows exactly how daft that sounds and plays it straight anyway. The pistols are the whole story, and they behave the way good objects in this series do, carrying the plot on their backs while the people around them do the panicking.

Ian La Frenais and Jonathan Gash wrote it, Baz Taylor directed. Ian McShane is Lovejoy, Phyllis Logan is Lady Jane Felsham, and the regular support of Dudley Sutton's Tinker Dill, Malcolm Tierney's Charlie Gimbert and Chris Jury's Eric Catchpole holds the East Anglian end together. Anthony Valentine plays Michael Seymour, Mark Kingston is Dr La Grange, Alison Skilbeck is Muriel, Richard Kay is Ronald Field, and Pavel Douglas plays Lord Alexander Felsham.

It is a solid piece of television with a simple engine: a man is dead because somebody wanted the complete set. Lovejoy has what they want, which makes him the target and the bait at the same time. It went out on 7 February 1986, the fifth episode of a first series that was already comfortable letting a pair of flintlocks carry an entire story. Not a bad day's work for a dealer who mostly wants to be left alone with his divvying and his dubious friends.