Smoke Your Nose

Lovejoy offers to sell a seventeenth century Smoke Your Nose dish for the Reverend Harry Nettles, and in return the vicar mentions something interesting: there is the remains of a Roman villa in the field next to his church. The field is marked for development by the shifty Derek Rudge, who plans a leisure centre. Nobody has bothered to take Harry's claims seriously, and the county archaeologist has agreed to the plans. The episode went out on 8 March 1992, and its story of a developer riding roughshod over history was topical then and has not lost its point.

Lovejoy races to thwart the developer. His investigation uncovers an arrangement between Rudge and the county archaeologist, Nancy Phelan, and the vicar's story is duly authenticated. A Roman mosaic floor, buried under a field earmarked for car parking: the episode is on the side of the old against the new without ever getting preachy about it. Lovejoy also finds time to dance with Jane, who is newly separated from Alexander, and the two threads give the episode its shape.

Ian La Frenais, Jonathan Gash and Terry Hodgkinson wrote it, Baz Taylor directed. Ian McShane is Lovejoy, Phyllis Logan is Lady Jane Felsham, Dudley Sutton is Tinker Dill, and Chris Jury is Eric Catchpole. Paul Rogers plays Rev. Harry Nettles, David Kossoff is Mr. Rosenbaum, Christopher Fulford is Derek Rudge, Michelle Fairley is Nancy Phelan, Tony Rohr is Rollo, and Paul Gregory is Ralph. Michelle Fairley, who would later play Catelyn Stark in Game of Thrones, makes Nancy Phelan a convincingly compromised professional.

Eric, meanwhile, is less fortunate, selling a grandfather clock to the pernickety Mr. Rosenbaum, who is definitely not what he seems. Paul Rogers, a stage actor of formidable reputation, gives Harry Nettles a mildness that hides real steel, and the vicar's quiet stubbornness carries the case. Between a Roman villa under threat and a clock sold to the wrong man, the episode finds the weight of history beneath our feet and the determination of progress to pave over it. The mosaic gets its moment in the sun.