Hi-de-Hi!

- Season 5

(1983)

Ted feigns illness to perform at a Chamber of Commerce gig, where Peggy is also moonlighting as a waitress. Peggy overhears Dawson, a local butcher, outline a plan to cream off concessions from the camp shop. Jeff finds out where Ted has been and next day Ted turns up with a black eye after trying to blackmail Dawson into cutting him in on his scam. However Peggy has rung Joe Maplin to alert him to Dawson's scheme and Maplin has assumed that she did so on Ted's authority, meaning that Jeff must go easy on the comic.

Jeff is horrified to learn that Maplin wants him to persuade elderly Mrs. Baxter to leave her cottage so it can be demolished to make way for an extension to the camp and he consults the Save British Heritage group as well as organizing a petition. However he learns that the cottage is to be 'accidentally' knocked down before the Save British Heritage team arrive for their assessment and he rallies the staff to hide the bulldozer. The plan works and he and Ted are invited to tea by the grateful old lady.

Fred is distraught to hear that Joe Maplin wants him to get rid of the six oldest of his beloved horses to make way for a new string of ponies. However Ted is aware that Maplin wants a knighthood and so he leaks to the press that Maplin is a charitable philanthropist who aims to turn part of the camp into a home for retired horses. Maplin cannot back down and the plan succeeds. It does, however, mean that people turn up at the camp with retired horses to be re-homed.

Jeff finally agrees to his wife Daphne's request that he will be the guilty party in their divorce and allow himself to be caught - by Peggy - in a compromising position with another woman. Gladys is dying to oblige but Jeff picks Jenny Maitland and takes her to dinner at a local Italian restaurant. Unfortunately he is taken ill with food poisoning. Gladys, Sylvia and Yellowcoats Betty and Tracey are all concerned for him so that when Peggy turns up as planned she finds him in bed surrounded by five women.

Statues of Joe Maplin are to be unveiled at all six of his holiday camps and, to make sure the work is done, his oily henchman Fox will visit Jeff's camp. The statue duly arrives but Spike gets drunk and defaces it with paint. Ted suggests another coat - of brown paint - which has to be done twice as the first coat is washed away by rain. Eventually the statue is unveiled and Fox is satisfied, though he is swayed by Peggy's little speech about how Joe Maplin saved her from a life in the gutter.

Peggy has a pen friend called Monty. He is seventeen years her senior but she seems happy enough and, in a dress lent her by Gladys, goes on a date with him. Next morning she announces that he has asked her to marry him. Everybody is keen to see what Monty looks like and the staff spy on him when he takes Peggy for a picnic. However he turns out to be more like thirty years older than her and she later tells Gladys that she turned him down as he really wanted somebody to nurse him in his old age.

The camp is hit by an epidemic of graffiti and Joe Maplin announces he will be visiting to make sure it is all erased. Barry hurts his back in trying to get rid of some and Yvonne calls in an old friend Julian, a retired dancer who now runs a pig farm, to replace him. Just before the visit Ted notices graffiti everywhere but gets the campers to clean it up, explaining it is the work of Fred, who had a traumatic wartime experience. The graffiti has all gone and Maplin is happy. As he drives off it is noticed that somebody has drawn on the back of his car.