SERIES 2 - First broadcast 1990

1. In Luton Airport, No-One Can Hear You Scream

Victor and Margaret return from their unfortunate holiday (whereupon they found the snake from Episode 1:6 dead in their suitcase and Victor was accidentally detained and searched for cocaine after complaining to the customs officers about the "crack in his bottom") to hear that their house has been demolished after a hurricane and a fire which, because their neighbour couldn't call the Fire Service because of her arthritis and could only call a singing telegram agency, had razed their house to the ground. Still, the free paper was still delivered to the remaining rubble, along with a free sachet of H.P. spicy sauce.

After six months and endless arguments with the insurance company, the Meldrews obtain a new house. They throw a housewarming party, but because of a couple of errors, they end up having three different parties in the same evening in three different houses (in #10 rather than #19 because the guests misread his #9; then in Nick's house because Victor and all the guests follow Margaret in when she goes to help Nick with his mum), confusing their guests regularly. After the parties end, Victor is found reminiscing near the building site that was their old house.

"to give them their due, they were round here very quickly. [...] The three men in gorilla costumes"(Mrs. Warboys explains the difficulty that happened in phoning the Fire Service.)

First broadcast: 4th October 1990

2. We Have Put Her Living In The Tomb

Victor applied T.C.P. to himself some time in the recent past, and it's been haunting him like, well, like a bad smell. In fact, everybody he comes across during this episode asks him if he's been using T.C.P. and he finds this typically irritating, especially when he loses his car in a multi-storey car park and the attendant brings back a car with the number-plate "TCP".

Margaret and Victor are invited to Margaret's goddaughter's to watch some home-movies including a nauseatingly graphic video of her daughter's birth. They're then entrusted with the family tortoise for a while whilst Margaret's goddaughter goes away on holiday, which leads to more trouble than might be imagined, with it being run over (and painted) by a road marker, and then accidentally thrown onto the garden fire. A quick spray with a hosepipe unfortunately doesn't undo the act of cremation. Still, a bit of good news for Victor and Margaret comes when they're given two tickets to a theatre show as a thank you for (their attempt at) looking after the tortoise. Only problem is that the tickets are for the show in the same theatre on the same date but in one year's time...

"That's Robert using the chemical toilet ... this is where Peter accidentally backs the land-rover over the duck."(Margaret's goddaughter narrates the bizarre home video they're watching.)

First broadcast: 11th October 1990

3. Dramatic Fever

Margaret's mum has been to stay for a while and, after having her dentures accidentally cemented together and being wallpaper-pasted into the bath, is setting off, so Margaret spends the day with her in Kettering. Meanwhile, Victor is attempting to write a sitcom whilst Margaret spends the day away, is pestered by incessant phone calls all day long, and accidentally books Margaret do to some catering at a television star's grand showcasing party.

When Victor and Margaret turn up, they explain they thought they'd just been invited and when Margaret was told to bring the bill, she brought a tape of the T.V. programme The Bill! Meanwhile Victor tries to put some litter bugs to right by entering into an argument with the first (which he loses and ends up with a copper pipe twisted round his neck) and tipping rubbish into another's car. Good idea perhaps, but he poured the rubbish into the wrong car! He might have gotten away with it, but when he looks through the hatch at the dinner party, one of the guests is talking about how someone maliciously tipped rubbish into his car which included camera films of an elderly man in a cap!

"You were the one who put all that powdered wallpaper paste in a big glass jar and left it upstairs last week? ... My mother thought they were bath salts; you know how she likes to tip a tonne of the stuff in. She fell asleep in the water reading The Daily Mirror; woke up like a giant tadpole in a bath of frogspawn. She looks like he's been pickled in aspic up there ... with both buttocks glued together like treacle; a crossword papered to one bosom and an Andy Cap cartoon to the other." (Margaret is angry with Victor about the mishaps that have happened to her mum)

First broadcast: 18th October 1990

4. Who Will Buy?

Margaret finds the fact that Victor leaving his ventriloquist's dummy on the sofa while they're watching TV a bit disturbing; besides which, it keeps bursting and spilling sawdust, so it's re-housed in the downstairs toilet in between Victor trying to regain the art of ventriloquism. Victor argues with a door-to-door salesman who tries to sell him bendy dinosaurs for his grandchildren, whilst Margaret is out at work and takes pity on an elderly blind man so gives him some flowers for free.

She returns home from work to find that Victor is entertaining Patrick and Pippa, but they have absolutely no idea where they've seen them before. So, like good hosts, Victor enthusiastically encourages them to stay over in their bed, which petrifies both them and Margaret when she realises they know them because they're their new neighbours! Margeret's elderly gentleman is found dead (because he couldn't afford a new light-bulb after being sold a set of bendy dinosaurs by the salesman), and Pippa think that Victor is the murderer after having misheard a conversation. Petrified, she takes every instruction of his literally and assists the ventriloquist's dummy in "urinating" into the downstairs toilet as Margaret looks on in disbelief.

"Right, there we are. Are you alright? You looked a bit edgy in the car. I expect you'd like a nice cup of tea. Did you hear me?" (Pippa thinks Victor is addressing his ventriloquist's dummy, not her)

First broadcast: 25th October 1990

5. Love And Death

Victor and Margaret are on their way to stay at their old fiends' guesthouse (sitting next to an elderly lady reading The Joy of Sex) but their holiday is typically punctuated by many unfortunate misunderstandings and mishaps: Victor finds a dead seagull stuck in a lavatory before dinner, where he thinks he's eating cat stew. They stay in a pokey room where Victor keeps banging his head on the ceiling whenever he stands. Margaret becomes jealous when Victor starts to talk to some Romanian girls who are also staying at the guesthouse, and she misunderstands many very innocent comments and situations.

Meanwhile, Victor is given a tombstone as a gift from Vince, and accidentally has a pint glass stuck on his head. He then has the misfortune to be beaten up by midgets (after entering the bathroom spraying midge spray) and, after an argument with Margaret, goes out to get drunk. He's found by the police inebriated and making seagull noises in a public toilet. After Victor sets light to the manageress' wig and Margaret throws the manager over the pier into the sea, Victor and Margaret reconcile and go home, hand in hand, looking forward to an early night...

"I hope your private parts recover soon." (It's easy to see how Margaret misunderstood this comment from the Romanian girls after the midgets kicked Victor in the privates)

First broadcast: 8th November 1990

6. Timeless Time

Victor can't sleep so he tosses and turns, moaning about anything and everything much to Margaret's frustration, from fitted sheets to the mystery of always finding a teaspoon at the bottom of a washing-up bowl, even when one hasn't used any teaspoons...

An owl defecates on Victor's car, setting off the alarm, which gives Victor yet another opportunity to rant and rave for a short while. He then has a bit of a philosophical moment thinking about the temporality of time and comes to the conclusion that nothing exists because everything merely used to exist or will exist later on, and the present becomes history as soon as it's happened! Victor and Margaret discuss each others' eccentric friends: one of whom has a morbid fear of spiders and therefore feels uneasy whenever they hear the cat-flap, and the other who's scared of toilet seats and so carries her own around with her. Carrying on the tradition of animals setting off Victor's car alarm, a cat then sits on it and triggers the alarm. He goes off to switch it off manually and treads into a dead and rotting hedgehog, which he tramples into the lovely bedroom carpet to Margaret's horror.

"I'll try counting my blessings; well that didn't take very long." (Victor is in a grumpy mood)

First broadcast: 15th November 1990

Christmas Special 1990 : Who's Listening?

Victor is playing a board game with his mother-in-law over the phone and is being a typically angry loser. He becomes angrier when a delivery of garden gnomes arrives; he gets 262 more than he wanted and is threatened with being charged for the lot of them on a sale and return basis, so they have to be stored all over the house in weird and wonderful places! Victor goes to the video store and is highly sarcastic to the woman, losing yet another friend.

Meanwhile, Pippa's dad, a vicar, is staying with Pippa and Patrick, and shares with Margaret how he's having a crisis of faith and will be leaving ministry because a loyal parishioner's husband is missing presumed dead. Victor feels guilty when he realises this is the woman he was rude to in the video store. A very expensive bottle of wine is delivered to the Meldrews' which was meant to be for Pippa's dad; but Victor pours it into the bubble and squeak. Victor fills the bottle with cheap plonk, but the cork flies off into Pippa's dad. In revenge, Patrick shoots all the garden gnomes to smithereens just as they're about to be driven away.

"I quite specifically ordered one ecclesia garden gnome catalogue number 263... never mind 'must have put it in the wrong column'! It only takes a bit of common sense – what could I possibly want with 263 bloody garden gnomes in the first place?" (Victor is having a discussion with the gnome delivery people)

First broadcast: 27th December 1990