Chinese Whispers

The Chen family's Chinese takeaway is set on fire. It looks at first like racial harassment, and the billing describes Crabbe as worried when his local Chinese takeaway seems to be the subject of racist attacks. The widowed Mr Chen will not go to the police. His daughter Mei asks Henry for help instead.

The reason for Chen's refusal is not fear of the attackers. He is a gambler, deeply in debt to a restaurateur in London's Chinatown who has been threatening him for the money he owes. The arson is a debt-collection tactic rather than a hate crime, and Chen's silence is the silence of a man who knows exactly who is behind it and why.

Pie in the Sky reaches the final of the Great British Grub contest, which is held in London. Crabbe uses the trip to visit Chinatown and act as a go-between on Chen's behalf, which is how the two strands join: the restaurant's competition entry is what gets the detective to the place where the debt is owed.

The production's synopsis closes on balance rather than triumph, recording that a winner and a loser return to Middleton come the end of the day. The debt and the threats to Chen are addressed through Crabbe's intervention in Chinatown, and the contest is decided with Pie in the Sky on one side of the result. Which side is which is not stated in the sources, and this article does not decide it. The episode is deliberately unresolved about whether the day counts as a success, and the food competition's outcome is separate from the criminal one.

Margaret enters her husband in a contest for best pub grub, which for a cook of his standards is close to an insult, and the joke about the marriage is at its sharpest here. The episode is one of the few in the series in which the restaurant is the case's route and motive at once, and the join between the two halves of the format is among the neatest in the run: the competition final is the reason Crabbe is in London and therefore the reason he can help the Chens.

The title states the episode's own subject. A takeaway fire reads to the neighbours, and to the audience, as a racist attack; the truth is a gambling debt, and the misreading is the story. The series rarely does a straightforward message episode, and this is the one case in the series where the assumptions of the people around a crime are themselves the material. Reception is negative and specific: Mr E Reviews called it an odd episode and the only one on the set its reviewer did not care for, objecting that there is a lot of moralising going on, and that complaint is fair, because the story has a point to make about assumptions and makes it more than once. The casting of a Chinese-British supporting company, including an early Benedict Wong, gives the episode a claim on attention its plotting does not entirely earn.