The Mayfly Dance

Jake Rivere is an ageing disc jockey whose cynical broadcasts have unexpectedly become a hit with Radio West's younger listeners, and he has revived a 1962 single called Lazy Daisy. The record has become a chart hit, and Don Satchley asks Eddie to find Jody Brent, the singer on it. Eddie goes to London to see Brent's former manager, who says she has no further contact with the pop business, then finds she is still tied to a management consortium, changes her mind and asks him for a drink. She tells him Brent is a recluse living in the United States and hands him a tape of a telephone conversation she had with him the previous night, for which the group's former drummer had given her the number.

Jake Rivere exposes the tape as a fraud. The drummer was killed in a car crash three years earlier, and the conversation has been assembled from old interview recordings made to be sent to radio DJs in the early 1960s. Eddie visits another surviving member of the band, now a farmer, and learns that a distinctly unsociable Jody was seen in Cardiff at some point in the recent past. The last survivor arrives in Bristol standing in with a cabaret band and turns up at Radio West asking for royalties on Lazy Daisy. Don sends him away and Eddie goes to see him. He says he wrote the song and has never received a penny for it. He then visits a woman who has just posted a letter to Radio West written in the name of a girl who was found drowned in a canal nearly twenty years earlier. Eddie spots the dead girl in the studio, in a taped television performance of Lazy Daisy. He visits the woman, having matched the recent letter against an older one on file written in her own name and address, and finds she has been murdered.

The station's legal adviser is an associate of the manager's. When Eddie learns he missed a Radio West meeting because he had to go to Cardiff, he drives there and finds Jody living under an assumed name on a barge. What happened is this. After the television appearance, the woman and the drowned girl left with Jody and another band member. The girl was on alcohol and pills, fell into a swimming pool and drowned while the others were not watching, and the legal adviser and the manager buried the death in a cover-up that has held for nearly twenty years. The band's songwriter, working separately and to his own purposes, killed the woman over the old secret.

The episode is about the pop industry's treatment of the people in it, and specifically about the value of a back catalogue to the people who own it rather than to the people who made it. The songwriter wants royalties he never got, the manager and the solicitor want the past to stay buried, Jody Brent wants to be left alone, and the woman is murdered for what she knew about a girl who died in a swimming pool and was written out of the record. Lance Percival plays the DJ as a performance rather than a character part and it is the best comic turn of the hour, since he alone can spot a fabricated tape because he knows the original broadcasts, and giving the solution to a guest is unusual for the series and works.

Where it congests is the trail of band members. Three are introduced in quick succession with similar functions, each having known Jody and each having a reason to say less than he knows, and the episode leans on the audience keeping three identically framed middle-aged men apart in a way that fifty minutes struggles to support. The respectable men who ran the cover-up are not arrested, charged or shamed, and the show lets them walk out of the story. The music is the production's own invention: Lazy Daisy was written for the episode by Ronnie Hazlehurst, so a fictional 1962 hit sits plausibly alongside the period records the show used elsewhere. It drew 10.2 million viewers.