Looking for Mr Wright

Lois, a legal secretary who works for Erica, meets a man called Clive Wright through a dating agency. During a meal at a restaurant he disappears, chased off by two men from a dinner party headed by a fairground owner named Maggie. Lois's work suffers, Erica asks her what is wrong, and then puts the problem to Eddie. The agency puts up a brick wall and the restaurant offers nothing. Eddie works out that Wright was there and got out through the bathroom window, and that the window has recently been replaced, because the putty around the frame is still soft. A girl at the restaurant mentions another party that night and a scuffle in the men's washroom.

At the fairground, Maggie's sons deny all knowledge of Wright. The sons burgle the dating agency and take every file relating to Wright, and Eddie is accused of the burglary and given twenty-four hours to prove he did not take them. The lead comes from an unlikely place: the flower Clive gave Lois, withered but still in its presentation box. At the shop where it was bought, Eddie finds the purchaser's surname is Wright and gets the man's address. At the block of flats he is warned off by an unfriendly caretaker, gets in when the front office is left empty, and is knocked unconscious by the sons, who have been searching the room. Recovering at Erica's, he works out that other women Wright dated are on the agency's files. Visiting the agency at lunchtime, he poses as a computer engineer come to service the printer and uses the computer to pull Wright's earlier dates. A woman who dated Wright before Lois tells him the man worked abroad, and the name of his company gives Eddie a current address and then Wright's hiding place, a hotel. Maggie and her sons, told by the caretaker where Wright is, take him before Eddie can get there.

Eddie drives to the fairground and finds Maggie has let Wright go, having privately told her workers to beat him up. Wright had a brief relationship with Maggie's daughter, who killed herself after he left her. Eddie tries to stop the beating and is held back, until one of the sons calls it off and tells his mother that she killed her own daughter by denying her a life. The girl had fallen in love with the first man she ever met and killed herself out of loneliness when he went. Maggie storms off. Wright thanks Eddie, who tells him to pass the thanks on to Lois. Wright says he has no idea what Lois has to do with any of it. Eddie leaves in disgust and has to tell Lois she will not be seeing her date again.

The case begins as a missing person and turns into a family vendetta, and the show lets the second thing be the whole answer: Wright did nothing illegal. He is a selfish man who left a young woman, and her death is her mother's doing. Diana Dors gets the part the episode was built around, a dramatic rather than a comic role, and her Maggie is a domineering woman who has destroyed her daughter and is destroying Wright, all in front of her sons. The part could easily have become a caricature and she carries it into something quiet and unpleasant instead. Avril Elgar plays Lois as a woman whose humiliation drives the story and who is treated by almost everyone in it as an inconvenience.

The dating agency is the episode's second subject. Every person in it is described, priced and shown on video to strangers, and the script presents that as ordinary commerce, which is what makes Lois's hopefulness painful. Eddie bluffs his way into a restaurant as a researcher for a fictitious food programme and into the agency as a computer engineer, both played for comedy. The resolution is rushed and Wright is a hole in the middle of it, a man who has to have been worth all the trouble and does not even remember to whom he owes his life. It drew 13.0 million viewers.