Fair Exchange

Charlotte buys a painting from a hard-up couple, the Tabors, and finds she has been conned. Lovejoy decides to set matters straight, which is his usual response to any wrong done to Charlotte. Then the plot turns on him: after a night of heavy drinking, he wakes up charged with assaulting Charlotte and stealing the very painting at the heart of the dispute. He has no memory of any of it. The episode opened series six on 2 October 1994, and it wastes no time putting its hero in the dock.

The accusation lands on a man whose memory has gone missing, and the episode makes that do the structural work. Lovejoy has to clear his name without being able to trust his own account of the evening, and the investigation brings in Beth Taylor, the police, and the Tabors in a tangle of deception and partial recollection. A fair exchange, it turns out, is the last thing anyone is offering. The amnesia device forces Lovejoy to work without his usual certainty, and the episode leans into that.

Ian La Frenais, Jonathan Gash and Eric Deacon wrote it, Richard Laxton directed. Ian McShane is Lovejoy, Dudley Sutton is Tinker Dill, Caroline Langrishe is Charlotte Cavendish, and Diane Parish is Beth Taylor. Joanna Kanska plays Anna Tabor, Clive Russell is Mark Tabor, Brian Protheroe is Gordon, Eric Deacon is Det. Insp. Hardwick, Christian Burgess is Alan Tennyson, and Harry Jones is Scotch Doogie. Eric Deacon, who shares the writing credit, also appears on screen as Detective Inspector Hardwick, a double shift the show takes in its stride.

It is a neat structural trick, giving the hero amnesia at the exact moment he needs his wits most. Even a straightforward piece of melodrama gets careful attention here, and watching Lovejoy argue with his own missing memory is one of the series' better variations on a theme.