Montezuma's Revenge

The manager of a heavy rock band wants to sell an ancient pre-Columbian solid gold statue, an old Colombian funerary figure, and it brings something unexpected with it: Inca black magic, or so the locals start to believe when two murders follow the statue into East Anglia. Lovejoy takes on the task of solving the mystery, which means dealing with a curse, a rock star's manager, and a very valuable piece that nobody can safely keep.

The investigation pulls in the usual suspects and a few new ones. Lady Jane Felsham and Lord Alexander Felsham are around, Tinker Dill and Eric Catchpole are as helpful as they always are, and the circle of people connected to the statue includes Rosita Lujemillo, played by Katia Caballero, Trevor Byfield's Jeff Diamond, John Stratton as Professor David Hayward, Mark Crowdy as Nick Bellenger, and Jack Ellis as the Detective Inspector. Ellis would later become famous as the thoroughly unpleasant Jim Fenner in Bad Girls, and here he plays the Detective Inspector with a straight face.

Ian La Frenais, Jonathan Gash and Alan Clews wrote it, William Brayne directed. La Frenais and Gash were the constant pair in the writing credits through this run, joined by a different third hand each week. It aired on 27 January 1991, and it remains one of the series' more gloriously silly outings: ancient curses, rock excess and amateur deduction stirred together in one volatile cocktail. Ian McShane holds the middle of it all as Lovejoy.

There is genuine fun in watching a show whose usual props are Georgian sideboards and Meissen figures try on a cursed golden idol for size. The murders keep it from tipping into farce, and the statue keeps its dignity better than most of the humans around it. Forgotten histories rarely get so lively an audience as East Anglia provides here.