Second Fiddle

Lindsey Parry-Davies, a leading violinist, wants Lovejoy to arrange for his Stradivarius to be touched up so that it will pass as a fake. The Lovejoy Antiques team is puzzled, and rightly so. They call in the expert advice of Tommy Norris, king of the violin fakers and a Liverpool supporter to boot, and the job of making a priceless instrument look worthless gets underway.

The oddness of the request keeps growing. There is an attempt to burgle Lindsey's house, and only then does he confide in Lovejoy about his true motivations. The plan was to thwart his stepfather, a failed musician who collects instruments solely to display them, like trophies on a shelf. Making the Stradivarius look like an imitation would rob the old man of his prize. By the end, the pair are reconciled, and the violin goes back to being what it always was: a thing to be played, not possessed.

Ian La Frenais, Jonathan Gash and Chris Kelly wrote it, John Crome directed. Ian McShane is Lovejoy, Phyllis Logan is Lady Jane Felsham, Dudley Sutton is Tinker Dill, and Chris Jury is Eric Catchpole. Michael Angelis plays Tommy Norris, Ronan Vibert is Lindsey Parry-Davies, Philip Bond is Duncan Strong, Sarah Alexander is Muriel, Robert MacLeod is Sterne, and Robert Swann is James Barnham-Smythe.

It went out in January 1993, early in the fourth season, and it keeps its sympathies with the musician rather than the money. It is a small, humane story, and the series knew exactly how much weight to give it. There is a lot of quiet pleasure in an episode about a man who would rather his violin be thought a fake than hang on a collector's wall. The world of valuable objects becomes a backdrop for something far more human than commerce or forgery, and the fiddle ends up exactly where it belongs.