The episode opens oddly with several people leaving work.  Mavis leaves Burge Chemist, Dr. Applegate leaves his practice,  an unnamed woman leaves the Slimming Clinic, and Frances leaves Boyles & Sanders Solicitors.

Dr. Applegate goes to Burge Chemist.  John Burge has been skimming pills off other prescriptions to sell to Applegate.  This extra cash helps Burge finance his adulterous affair.  To be fair, he complains that his wife Mary has ballooned up to “11 Stone, 12 Pounds” (163 pounds).  So I guess that woman leaving the Slimming Clinic was not an employee.

Uh-oh, this just in from the CDC:

So this 1980 behemoth is still smaller than the average US woman today?  Yikes!  But who believes anything the CDC says anymore?

Burge meets up with his wife’s attractive best friend Frances.  She refers to Mary as a pig and Burge rebukes her.  He says, “Women are awful — men have some kind of loyalty” . . . before they start smooching in an alley.   Then Burge admits he does think of his wife as “a fat, fat, fat pig.”  They laugh when he describes her being weighed by hanging her from a crane like a sow.

While Mary is watching TV and eating bonbons at home, Frances suggests that Burge get a divorce.  They agree that Frances will later see if Mary had ever thought about it.  Mary says that her husband would not divorce her because she would take him for every penny pence.

The next night when Burge comes home, Mary is shaving her legs, propped up on the kitchen table, with his electric razor.  So weight isn’t the only problem.

This really is the simplest of stories.  It is loaded with details and characters that are unnecessary, yet everything works.  I could take a few paragraphs to go through the mechanics, or write one spoilerific sentence and be done for the month.  Hmmm, I know which I would choose.

Burge gives his wife a box of chocolates that he has poisoned, and she regifts them to Frances to eat on her plane trip to America.

I might sound dismissive, but this really is a great episode and a classic ending.  Yes, Burge has killed Frances but she might not even be dead yet; and there’s not a damn thing he can do about it because she is over the Atlantic.

Not only that, but Mary gave Frances the chocolates because she was committed to slimming down to save her marriage.  So he accidentally killed Frances and won’t even have the newly svelte Mary because the poison will be easily traceable to him.

But he will know nothing for sure until the plane lands in 6 hours . . . 5 with a tailwind.

Other Stuff:

After all the recent stories of Roald Dahl’s work being rewritten by censorious fascist do-gooders, here Dahl is cancelled completely.  In this case, he was replaced by an apparently woke writer who is best known for his novel about a transvestite.

OK, OK, the writer is the great Robert Bloch, and this was 43 years ago.  I had assumed that this series was based 100% on Dahl’s work as, up until now, it had been.  Maybe this is a good thing.  God knows Ray Bradbury Theatre could have used a little fresh DNA in the gene pool.