Death and Venice (1)

Venice suits Lovejoy about as well as a suit of armour, but off he goes anyway, because a friend of his has been murdered there. The dead friend had bought a painting that Lovejoy believed to be a fake, which is the kind of professional opinion that tends to get people killed in this trade.

The city is also full of an American multimillionaire, sickly and paraplegic, who is obsessed with saving the art treasures of a slowly sinking Venice and has hired Lovejoy to help with the enterprise. Between the sinking city and the sinking feeling that something is wrong, Lovejoy is drawn into an ambitious art swindle. The twins behind it are Caterina and Lavinia, identical in face and identical in guile, and the scam reaches into every corner of the local art world.

Ian La Frenais and Jonathan Gash wrote it, Baz Taylor directed. Ian McShane is Lovejoy, Phyllis Logan is Lady Jane Felsham, and the regulars Dudley Sutton, Malcolm Tierney and Chris Jury come along to keep him company. Alexander Knox plays Pinder, Gwen Humble is Caterina, Haydn Gwynne is Cosima, Alibe Parsons is Nancy, and Albert Welling is Gerry.

The change of scenery does the show good. It went out on 7 March 1986 as the first half of the series' closing two-parter, and the setting gives the show a glamour it rarely bothers with at home, though the grubby business of faking art travels well. Haydn Gwynne, later a familiar face from Drop the Dead Donkey, plays Cosima, and Alexander Knox brings some old-school authority to Pinder. The mystery is grander than the usual Suffolk business, but the pleasure is the same one: watching a man read objects and people with equal suspicion. Even among the canals and the palazzos, the fake is the fake, and Lovejoy can smell one from a gondola away.