The Farmer Had a Wife

David Mortimer farms watercress. His wife Rosemary has disappeared for the second time, and the villagers have decided she has been murdered. They smear the house with mud and taunt him, Mortimer cracks and hits a teenager, breaking his jaw, and his court appearance falls on the same day as Eddie's appearance as a witness in an unrelated case, which is adjourned. One of the people at the hearing tells Eddie what the village believes. Don Satchley, wanting more human interest in the phone-in, pushes him to take the case, and Eddie visits the farm and persuades Mortimer that he will prove him innocent.

Rosemary had been ill before she first went away. Eddie visits the village doctor, who tells him the local GP at the relevant time was Christopher Knightley, now a university lecturer. Eddie goes to Knightley and gets nothing useful, then finds himself thrown into a pond by three members of the rowing team Knightley coaches. He presses him a second time for an account of his relationship with Rosemary, and to keep the past from his wife Knightley talks. Mortimer would not let Rosemary mix with anyone. When she became ill, Knightley treated her, they began an affair and she became pregnant. The child, now nine years old, was adopted. Eddie traces the mother to a convent where she is a music teacher. Mortimer wants Rosemary back and asks for her whereabouts, and Eddie agrees to tell him, and the two meet. Rosemary tells Mortimer she will never return: he has destroyed her life. Eddie tells the story on air as part of his show, changing the names as he normally does. The programme goes out live. While it is on air, Mortimer kills himself.

Village gossip is the antagonist. Nobody in the story has committed the crime the village believes in; a mob has decided on a story, and the story does the damage. The episode makes the connection explicitly by having Mortimer's violence follow the harassment rather than precede the rumour. Ronald Hines plays him without asking for mercy: he is a bully who has ruined his wife's life by refusing to let her have one, and the episode's horror is that the village's conviction that he murdered her is wrong while its judgement of him is right. Yvonne Gilan has one scene as Rosemary and delivers the verdict, that she will not go back. Gary Watson's Knightley is a coward of a different sort, one who will talk only when the alternative is his wife finding out.

Eddie is placed badly in this case and the episode knows it. He persuades Mortimer that he will prove him innocent, he does prove him innocent, and the man kills himself because of the truth Eddie then broadcasts. The episode never lets Eddie say a word about it. The fan commentary's reading, that Eddie would not have been surprised, only disappointed, is the fairest available summary of what the episode does with him. It is the bleakest of the ten, and the interleaved humour, the bowling green, Gladys Robinson's newspaper round, Eddie's fitness regime, his being mistaken for a medical student in a lecture hall, sits directly against the ending. The joke material is not sharp enough to earn the contrast and it occupies a lot of a fifty-minute episode whose second half is about a woman kept prisoner in her own marriage. The mystery itself is thin: there is no crime, only a woman who has gone away. What holds it is the ending, a live broadcast that kills the client's husband, staged off screen and never discussed afterwards, which British series television of 1980 rarely attempted. Daniel Day-Lewis appears as the station's disc jockey, twenty-three years old and two years from his film debut, in a part with no dialogue of consequence. It drew 12.2 million viewers.