No Strings

The Hothouse Flowers are due to appear at a local charity gig, and their manager is an old friend of Tinker's. Before going away with Victoria on a little trip, Lovejoy gets Jane to agree to take the band in. That seems manageable, right up until the organizer of the planned gig runs off with the money. One of the band decides to sell his valuable antique harp to make good some of the shortfall, and before Lovejoy can even arrange the sale, the harp disappears as well. A Celtic harp is about as Irish an instrument as exists, which makes its theft from an Irish band feel pointed.

So there is a stolen Celtic harp, a vanished organizer, a rock group in the house, and Lovejoy trying to solve it all while working his way up to proposing to Victoria. He asks. She turns him down, kindly but firmly, and goes back to South America. The romance ends quietly, with a woman boarding a plane, and Lovejoy left holding the usual collection of bills and questions.

Ian La Frenais, Jonathan Gash and Douglas Watkinson wrote it, Peter Barber-Fleming directed, and it aired on 26 January 1992. Ian McShane is Lovejoy, Phyllis Logan is Lady Jane Felsham, Dudley Sutton is Tinker Dill, Chris Jury is Eric Catchpole, and Joanna Lumley is Victoria Cavero. The Hothouse Flowers, whose hit 'Don't Go' had made them one of the better-known Irish bands of the late eighties, play themselves: Liam Ó Maonlaí, Fiachna Ó Braonáin, Peter O'Toole, Leo Barnes and Jerry Fehily.

The episode juggles the theft of a priceless instrument with the end of an affair, and it is to the show's credit that the harp gets the more dignified treatment. Some valuable things are intangible, as the closing line of the plot notes would have it, but the harp is very tangible indeed, and getting it back matters.