Guns and Roses

Lovejoy takes an antique gun to a London gunsmith to be repaired, and walks into somebody else's war. The armourer is having landlord problems: he refuses to sell his shop, which sits in what has become a red light district, and the local vice lord wants him out. When the gunsmith will not budge, the vice lord frames both him and Lovejoy for a robbery. The episode aired on 30 October 1994 and turns a landlord dispute into a framing charge, which is the series at its most cynical.

So a simple repair job turns into a fight against a framed charge, with the shop's tenancy at the centre of it all. Meanwhile an acquaintance of Lovejoy's, Texas Greenberg, is on his way over to buy something special, and the episode keeps that appointment ticking in the background like a clock that will not be ignored. Petty desperation over rent and property rights escalates into genuine crime drama, and Lovejoy has to unpick the whole thing without losing his customer.

Ian La Frenais, Jonathan Gash and John Milne wrote it, Ian White directed. Ian McShane is Lovejoy, Dudley Sutton is Tinker Dill, and Caroline Langrishe is Charlotte Cavendish. William Franklyn plays Burgess, Jonathan Coy is Geoffrey Tibbs, Allan Surtees is George Wilson, Lorna Heilbron is Alice Williams, Garry Cooper is Kevin the Ponce, Maggie Ollerenshaw is Kate Henshaw, and Dinah Stabb is D.I. Dunne. Franklyn gives the stubborn gunsmith Burgess the air of a craftsman Lovejoy instinctively sides with, even when it costs him.

It is interesting how quickly a domestic dispute over a shop can escalate into something requiring police intervention and Lovejoy's particular sleuthing touch. A gunsmith's stubbornness, a vice lord's grudge, and a Texan due any minute: the episode fires from several directions at once, and the repair job gets done in the end, more or less.