Fly the Flag

A family struggling to pay death duties needs Lovejoy's help to raise the wind. Christian Shotley asks him to sell the family antiques, but when Lovejoy examines them he finds they are not genuine antiquity at all. They are excellent forgeries, and the forger was Christian's own father, which puts the family in a delicate position with the taxman and with their own history.

Then Beau Whittaker, a local ladies' man working in the parish church, finds something far more valuable: an old flag dating from the American War of Independence, hidden behind a monument. The flag dates from the battle of Lexington, one of the first clashes of the war, which makes the argument over its owner all the sharper. The discovery promises a profitable sale, but Colonel Fellowes, an American air force man, claims the flag was stolen from his own family two hundred years earlier. With the local vicar entering the fray, the ownership of a single piece of cloth becomes a battle. As if the Shotleys did not have enough on their plate, they also possess a priceless set of model soldiers whose sale could ease their worries.

Ian La Frenais, Jonathan Gash and Douglas Watkinson wrote it, Rob Walker directed. Ian McShane is Lovejoy, Phyllis Logan is Lady Jane Felsham, Dudley Sutton is Tinker Dill, and Chris Jury is Eric Catchpole. Michael Hordern plays Wilfred Shotley, Elizabeth Spriggs is Daphne Shotley, Pip Torrens is Christian Shotley, Eoin McCarthy is Beau Derek Whittaker, Angus MacInnes is Chuck Fellowes, and Peter Whitman is John D. Parmenter. It aired in February 1993, when Michael Hordern and Elizabeth Spriggs were exactly the sort of grand casting the series could call on.

The episode is a finely constructed puzzle, blending the domestic anxieties of financial ruin with the drama of a contested piece of history. Sometimes the most valuable things are not the ones easily sold for cash, but the ones whose true provenance is hotly disputed. A flag, a forgery and a set of toy soldiers: the Shotley estate has it all.