Lily's Pearls

Jane's husband, Alexander, has taken on a new business partner called Joe Gruder, a brash upstart financier with a plan to buy land for a wildlife sanctuary. Lovejoy is suspicious of him, and so is Jane. The motives smell less like conservation and more like something else entirely. Jane's instinct about Joe proves sound, and the wildlife sanctuary talk gets thinner the closer Lovejoy looks.

Then Jane gets a call from Lily Gruder, Joe's dizzy wife, who has a problem with some pearls and a pawnbroker. Lovejoy decides to look into Joe's affairs, and Mr Gruder does not come up smelling of roses. The best detail is the simplest: both Joe and Lily have independently pawned Lily's pearls when they found themselves short of cash, and both of them have engaged Lovejoy to get them back. A husband and wife each quietly cashing in the same jewellery, and each hoping the other never finds out, is a very Lovejoy kind of mess.

Ian La Frenais, Jonathan Gash and Roger Marshall wrote it, Bill Hays directed, and it aired on 10 March 1991. Ian McShane is Lovejoy, Phyllis Logan is Lady Jane Felsham, Dudley Sutton is Tinker Dill, and Chris Jury is Eric Catchpole. Pavel Douglas plays Lord Alexander Felsham, Nicky Henson is Joe Gruder, Sherrie Hewson, later to spend years in Coronation Street, plays Lily with a giddy energy that never quite hides the steel underneath. Bernard Brown is Wing Co Warren, Tim Wylton is Howitt, and Ken Wynne is Reg Partridge.

It is a tidy little affair about greed wearing a green wellie. The wildlife sanctuary is a smokescreen, the pearls are a tug of war, and the Gruders' marriage is doing all the heavy lifting as comedy. Lovejoy, as ever, ends up holding both ends of the rope and getting paid twice for the trouble.