Irish Stew

Kit Kelly arrives in Middleton with her large Irish family and her brand-new husband, Byron de Goris, a well-off expatriate American television writer. Kit has been married several times before, and her brothers come with her: Ned, Luke, Peter and young Matt, with their mother Ma Kelly and Rita. They book Pie in the Sky for the wedding banquet. Kit is the one who chose the restaurant, and she is a warm, capable, generous woman who has buried several husbands and is not a fortune-hunter. The restaurant has to absorb a large, loud wedding party and make it work, with the brothers crowding the kitchen and Gary and Nicola in the middle of it.

Byron's briefcase is stolen from his hotel room. Henry is suspicious not of the theft but of Byron's reaction to it: a man whose documents really matter would be frantic, and Byron's distress is at once too specific and too well controlled. Henry looks into the documents, and the case becomes an identity enquiry.

The identity is the story. Margaret had known both Byron de Goris and his friend James Jackson in the 1960s, when she was a Mod working in Carnaby Street. She recognises the groom from that time and recognises that the man calling himself Byron de Goris is James Jackson. Thirty years earlier Byron de Goris killed himself and James Jackson took his name and his life. Henry has to establish why the substitution was made and why it is being kept.

The episode's twin answer is inheritance and affection. The motive for the impersonation is money: Byron is making the marriage so as to become eligible for a sizeable inheritance. The suspicion falls naturally on Kit as the woman who outlives her husbands, and the truth is that she genuinely loved the men she married and their deaths were coincidental, while it is the groom who is marrying for gain. Theft of the briefcase belongs to the same scheme, since the documents that could expose the identity are what the thief was after. The resolution is quiet by the series' standards: the wedding party is dealt with, the deception is exposed, and Margaret's past is the thing that breaks it.

Orla Brady's Kit is the episode's centre. The script asks for a woman who is both the object of the family's suspicion and entirely innocent of what she is suspected of, and Brady plays her without self-pity. Nigel Terry's Byron has to be convincing as a man everyone likes and slightly wrong in a way only Crabbe notices, and he holds the uncertainty for the whole running time. Maggie Steed's Margaret gets the best material: the accountant wife whose function is usually to question the finances is given a life before the series began, and her recognition scene is the point at which a restaurant problem becomes a police case. The Kelly brothers turn the restaurant into a crowd scene, and the comedy of a large family taking over the kitchen is the episode's comic engine.

This is the episode of the six that makes the restaurant the engine of the crime most completely. The wedding booking is not the parallel plot: the guests are the suspects and the crime is committed among the people the restaurant is feeding. The theme is identity and appetite, who a person was, who they are pretending to be, and who is marrying whom for what. It is the warmest and funniest episode of the run and the best evidence that the series is a comedy-drama rather than a procedural, though DVD Talk is right that the assumed-identity plot is signposted early enough for experienced viewers to get there before Crabbe.