The Prague Sun

An old friend of Lovejoy's asks for help when her wartime sweetheart, a Czech pilot who was presumed killed in action, reappears after fifty years. The man has returned to England to collect a cache of gemstones buried in the grounds of a church. He is killed when he tries to retrieve them.

The diamonds were looted from Prague during the war, and Lovejoy and Eric travel there on the trail of the jewels. In Prague they encounter sinister forces who also want the gems and are prepared to murder for them. What begins as a romance out of the past turns into something much darker, and the Christmas setting of the original broadcast only sharpens the contrast between tinsel and the aftermath of war. It was broadcast on Boxing Day 1992, and that festive slot makes the darkness feel deliberate.

Ian La Frenais, Jonathan Gash and Dick Clement wrote it, Clement being one half of the team behind Porridge and Auf Wiedersehen, Pet. Geoffrey Sax directed. Ian McShane is Lovejoy, and Chris Jury is Eric Catchpole, the pair of them a long way from the Suffolk salerooms. Phyllis Logan is Lady Jane Felsham and Dudley Sutton is Tinker Dill. The guest cast is led by Donald Pleasence as Karel Redl and Peter Vaughan as Marek, with Dinah Sheridan as Dotty Mayhew, Leonie Mellinger as Marina, Malgorzata Gebel as Aneska, and Brian McGrath as Franz. Both Pleasence and Vaughan bring the kind of heavyweight menace that tells you how seriously this story takes itself.

It is the sort of episode that reminds you the series could go dark when it wanted to. A fifty-year-old promise, a churchyard full of wartime secrets, and diamonds with blood on them. The Prague Sun may be a priceless religious piece, but the story around it is worth more than the stones. The story sends the regulars abroad, which the series did rarely, and the foreign setting suits its darker mood.