Bin Diving

Lovejoy values the house contents of an elderly widow, an old friend of Jane's. The widow is burgled soon afterwards, and the local police decide the dealer who was just given a guided tour of the valuables is their prime suspect. Lovejoy does what he always does when the official channels point his way: he ignores them and works it out himself.

His ally is Brian Nunn, a remarkable bin man played by Warren Clarke, who knows what gets thrown away and who comes back for it. Clarke would later spend years playing Dalziel in Dalziel and Pascoe, and he brings the same unhurried authority to a man who has quietly made the town's rubbish his own. And matters are complicated by Eric's bin diving habit, which puts him in territorial dispute with Nunn over the right to salvage valuables from the rubbish. There is something very Lovejoy about a mystery solved with the help of a dustman while the apprentice squabbles over a discarded lampshade.

Ian La Frenais, Jonathan Gash and Terry Hodgkinson wrote it, Baz Taylor directed, and it aired on 20 January 1991. Ian McShane is Lovejoy, Phyllis Logan is Lady Jane Felsham, and Chris Jury is Eric Catchpole. Brenda Bruce plays Mrs. Jaglom, Amanda Swift is Betty Morgan, Harriet Reynolds is Madge, Neil Dudgeon is DS Graham Bentley, James Bowers is DC Malcolm Hubbard, and Edward Rawle-Hicks is Alistair. Dudgeon, later to spend years as John Barnaby in Midsomer Murders, plays DS Bentley with a young man's eager confidence.

It is a satisfyingly British piece of television, treating a grand burglary mystery and a minor civic dispute with equal affection. The suspect, the dustman and the apprentice, all circling the same pile of other people's property: the episode knows exactly how absurd that is, and it plays it for all the warmth it can get.