The March of Time

An old clock comes to Lovejoy in a trade with another dealer, and hidden in the back of it he finds a bundle of priceless love letters from the Napoleonic era. He falls for the owner of the letters almost at once, which is the part of the job he can never resist. But a divvie's enthusiasm has to survive contact with professional scepticism, and the question sits there unanswered: are the letters genuine?

To find out, he sets out under the name Captain Lovejoy, following the paper trail back to its source. It is a grand alias for a man who is mostly trying to keep out of prison, and the letters take him through the kind of tangled provenance that makes antique dealers either rich or very sorry. The romance of the find and the cold facts of authentication pull against each other for the whole episode.

Ian La Frenais, Jonathan Gash and Murray Smith wrote it, Ken Hannam directed. Ian McShane is Lovejoy, Phyllis Logan is Lady Jane Felsham, Dudley Sutton is Tinker Dill, Malcolm Tierney is Charlie Gimbert, and Chris Jury is Eric Catchpole. Lysette Anthony plays Sophy, James Aubrey is Michael, John Scholes is Sgt Drabble, Geoffrey Drew is Berwick, and Laurence Harrington is Ricky.

It is a gentler sort of mystery, the kind where nobody gets shot and the danger is mostly to the heart. A simple antique generates an elaborate investigation into personal history and forgery, and Lovejoy gets to be both romantic and rigorous, sometimes in the same scene. It went out on 28 February 1986 near the end of the first series, and the letters' provenance is the quiet engine of the whole story: a clear paper trail makes a document worth a fortune, while a doubtful one leaves it worth very little. The clock keeps time; the letters keep their secrets until the end.