Black Pudding

Hilary Smallwood is a famous food writer and one of Crabbe's heroes. He read her cookbooks when he was starting out. She is old, cantankerous and living in a retirement home because, in a moment of weakness, she signed a power of attorney over to her nephew Colin. Colin has sold her cottage and moved her into the home, and he is now after the one thing she still owns: her unpublished memoirs, which are full of scandal about her earlier life.

Hilary calls on Crabbe for help, and on Seymour Flint, her lifelong friend and former suitor, a slightly batty poet turned pig farmer who makes, in the episode's title, a perfect black pudding. Hilary has entrusted the memoirs to Seymour, which is why Colin cannot find them. Colin has the law on his side, and that is the problem: power of attorney is a legal instrument, Crabbe is a policeman rather than a solicitor, and the episode makes clear that the wrong here is not a criminal wrong that can be arrested.

Hilary dies during the episode. The death is not a murder; she is very old and unwell, and no source describes an autopsy or an inquest. What matters is what she did with the memoirs before she died, and the episode's closing movement is the discovery that she has arranged matters from beyond the grave to defeat Colin. The mechanism by which that arrangement takes effect is not detailed in the sources, and this article does not invent the legal detail. Colin's scheme is defeated not by an arrest but by Hilary's own handling of her affairs, and the greedy nephew gets nothing. Crabbe's role is to have been the man she asked and to have been present at the end.

The restaurant strand runs on friction between Steve and John. The two men are increasingly at odds, and the argument is a working one about the kitchen and the floor rather than anything personal. The sources do not describe the kitchen side beyond that, and the strand is the episode's weakest material.

Helena McCarthy plays Hilary as a woman who has decided she is finished and intends to go out on her own terms, with the cantankerousness as a defence, and Geoffrey Bayldon's Seymour is the comic figure whose feelings are real. The scene in which he explains what black pudding is — the whole animal used, nothing wasted, an honest food — is the episode's statement of the series' position on food and its justification of its own title. Griffiths plays Crabbe here as an admirer rather than as a detective, visibly a younger man in the presence of the woman whose books taught him.

The title is a dish and a whole argument: black pudding is made from the parts a fastidious kitchen would throw away, and Seymour's defence of it is a defence of honest food against fashion. This is the episode in which the two strands are least connected and it does not matter, because the unity is thematic — an old woman's food, an old woman's body, and the question of what is kept and what is thrown away. It is also the episode of the series that receives unqualified praise, with DVD Talk calling it one stand-out episode and judging that it alone almost makes up for the other nine.