Somewhere Over the Rainbow

Tinker disappears without a word, depressed after Lovejoy bawls him out over an incorrect appraisal. Lovejoy sets off at once to find him, and the trail ends in Devon, where a surprise is waiting: Tinker's real name is Archie. He has a sister, too, whose hotel business is threatened by a rogue property developer, and the whole family history that Tinker has kept folded away for years comes out into the light. The episode aired on 16 October 1994, and it is one of the few times the series lets Tinker carry the emotional weight of an hour.

Charlotte and Beth join the effort, and together they look for ways to raise the money to save the hotel. Meanwhile Tinker, in a scatter of guilt and distraction, has lost the key to Charlotte's safe-deposit box, which is the kind of small disaster that this show knows how to make feel enormous. A vanishing friend turns into a family rescue, and the man who vanished turns out to have been someone else all along.

Ian La Frenais, Jonathan Gash and Jeremy Paul wrote it, Ian White directed. Ian McShane is Lovejoy, Dudley Sutton is Tinker Dill, Caroline Langrishe is Charlotte Cavendish, and Diane Parish is Beth Taylor. Ursula Howells plays Olive Nettleton, Richard Vernon is Roger Nettleton, Kenneth Cope is John Ikin, Christopher Guard is Jake, John Quentin is Sir Ronald Edgehill, and Erich Redman is Walter Vronk. Kenneth Cope, remembered by many for Randall and Hopkirk (Deceased), turns up as John Ikin, while Ursula Howells and Richard Vernon are the Nettletons around whom the family drama turns.

There is real warmth in an episode that finally gives Tinker a history. The hotel, the developer, the lost key: it is a thoroughly interwoven puzzle of family enterprise and local commerce, and it ends with the firm closer than it was before. Archie, for what it is worth, is a much better name for trouble than Tinker.