One Born Every Minute

Ashley Wilkes travels around East Anglia painting charming pictures of country cottages and seducing their female inhabitants. He has talent, and he is squandering it on kitsch, which annoys Lovejoy on professional grounds before anything else. Then an army officer hires Lovejoy to find Wilkes, on the pretext of arranging a commission, and Lovejoy smells a rat.

The hunt takes him through the villages, chasing a painter who is always one step ahead and leaving a trail of flattered hostesses behind him. When Lovejoy finally catches up with the elusive Wilkes, it turns out the painter has a genuinely terrible secret, the kind that makes the cottage paintings look like the least of his crimes. It is a deceptively simple setup, and the episode builds some real weight out of it.

Don Leaver directed, with Ian La Frenais, Jonathan Gash and Roger Marshall on the script, and the episode aired on 10 February 1991. Ian McShane is Lovejoy, and Dudley Sutton is Tinker Dill. Tom Wilkinson plays Ashley Wilkes, in one of those guest roles where you watch him and wonder why it took the rest of the world so long to notice him. Jeremy Child is Major Chatfield, Jennie Linden is Roz Chatfield, Maggie Steed is Joanna, Nicholas Day is Alec Statham, Simon Slater is Whiteman, Tim Killick is Jenkins, and Judy Buxton is Deborah Wyler. Leaver was a veteran of British television drama, and he keeps the chase through the villages brisk. Wilkes may be a rogue, but his cottage paintings are exactly the kind of thing the show loves to linger over between crimes.

A charming painter, a string of seductions, and a secret worth hiding from the army: the episode keeps its cards close and plays them well. Wilkes is the best kind of Lovejoy villain, a man you almost like, right up until you find out what he has been up to.