Sugar and Spice

Lovejoy is in hot water over the school fees of his teenage daughter, Vicky. That is the background hum to the whole episode. Then a schoolgirl asks the firm to sell some erotic drawings for her, much to Eric's disgust, and Lovejoy takes the job without quite knowing what he is getting into.

The drawings are Fuseli prints, by the Swiss-born painter best known for The Nightmare, and the girl is Khadija Subhani, whom Lovejoy later recognises as a pupil at Vicky's school during speech day. She has stolen the pictures from the school as an act of revenge on the headmistress, Miss Hemmingway, for the way she treated Khadija's older sister. But the girl is being duped, pushed around by a blackmailer who wants to discredit her family. When Lovejoy sees Khadija threatened on school grounds, he decides there is more to the story than meets the eye. And there is a practical angle too: if he retrieves the prints, Miss Hemmingway will waive the large amount of fees he owes.

Ian La Frenais, Jonathan Gash and Steve Coombes wrote it, Baz Taylor directed, and it aired on 24 February 1991. Ian McShane is Lovejoy, Phyllis Logan is Lady Jane Felsham, and Chris Jury is Eric Catchpole. Caroline Blakiston, whom Star Wars fans will know as Mon Mothma, plays Miss Hemmingway with proper severity. Mel Martin is Susan Lovejoy, the former wife who gets vexed by all of it, Tania Rodrigues is Khadija Subhani, and Amelia Shankley is Vicky. Laurence Harrington, Imogen Boorman and Gloria Connell make up the Harrington-Morse family.

The episode works because the mystery grows out of ordinary embarrassments: unpaid fees, a failed marriage, a school grudge. The Fuseli prints are the excuse; the real story is about fathers and daughters, and about Lovejoy discovering that the price of being a rogue is that the bill eventually arrives.