Breaking the Broker

The police set up Tinker in order to get a favour from Lovejoy. Det. Sgt. Pulver, frustrated by his failure to gather evidence on a Polish smuggler, frames Tinker Dill and dangles the charges like bait. The favour they want: Lovejoy should check out an up-market pawnbroker suspected of receiving antiques stolen from overseas. It is an elaborate sting, and the co-opting of the most honest man in the firm is the hook. The episode aired on 13 November 1994, and the police leaning on an innocent man to get at a bigger fish is one of the series' darker openings.

Lovejoy, as ever, has no choice but to play along, and the episode becomes a taut affair where the pursuit of truth means moving through the shadowy world of illicit trade and the treacherous rivalries between officers of the law. The policemen's motives are as crooked as anything the pawnbroker is hiding, and the series has rarely been so open about that particular truth.

Ian La Frenais, Jonathan Gash and Douglas Watkinson wrote it, Alex Kirby directed. Ian McShane is Lovejoy, Dudley Sutton is Tinker Dill, Caroline Langrishe is Charlotte Cavendish, and Diane Parish is Beth Taylor. Martin Jarvis plays Adam Bailey, Karen Drury is Julie Bailey, Gary Waldhorn is Det. Sgt. Pulver, Struan Rodger is Sidelski, Christopher Godwin is Konrad Dekker, and Lizzie Mickery is Det. Con. Croft. Jarvis, whose voice has been a fixture of British radio for decades, gives the pawnbroker an unshakeable courtesy, while Waldhorn, later of The Vicar of Dibley, gives Sergeant Pulver an oily persistence.

It is a reminder that even in the pursuit of grand criminality, the greatest obstacles often reside in the flawed motives and petty rivalries of the people tasked with solving the crimes. The sting works, more or less, and Tinker gets his revenge on Pulver in the only currency he knows: embarrassing the man in public.