In Sickness and in Health

- Season 3

(1987)

Having got himself a free teas-maid by causing a scene in an electrical shop Alf goes home to open a private letter to Rita,telling her her divorce from Mike has come through. He is overjoyed as he thinks she will move into the spare room and look after him. However she is planning to marry local doctor Thompson so Alf reluctantly is forced to let Winston have the room instead. To compound Alf's joy Fred Johnson has made sure the teas-maid goes off in the night and wakens all the street.

After holding forth in the pub on how foreigners have brought AIDS to England Alf and his friend Arthur visit a sex shop,where Arthur steals a pornographic magazine but gives it to Alf to mind for him. When Mrs Hollingbery finds it Alf blames it on Winston and tries to have him evicted but Arthur puts his foot in it by turning up at the house asking for his book just as it is being torn up.

Alf decides to invest in his own phone but quickly finds himself at war with Mrs Hollingbery over its use as she claims ownership as she is the householder. With the phone being cordless they are frequently hiding it from each other and Winston's calls to Jamaica are no help whilst Alf's delight in trying out his new acquisition by ringing everybody he knows leads to friction with Arthur's wife and injury for Fred Johnson.

Min and Gwenneth pay Alf another visit,Gwenneth as confused as ever as she mistakes Alf for a doctor and takes her skirt off and,in the pub,mistakes Arthur for an old boyfriend. Back at the house the sisters hold a seance which Winston and his boyfriend use to make Alf believe he is possessed by an evil spirit before faking a conversation with God,who persuades Alf to give the women his bed for the night.

At the local old time dance afternoon Alf is challenged to fight ageing Lothario Fancy Fred by two merry widows who end up fighting each other but Alf has his chance to threaten Fred when Fred parks his van on the pavement outside the house. However when Alf gets his legs wedged on the window ledge as he tries to clean the window Arthur and Winston see Fred's van as a means of escape. Fred has other ideas though and Alf has a landing of a different sort.

On a boiling hot summer day Alf goes to the DHSS to complain that he should have had more money in last winter's heating allowance for living in an end terrace but it cuts no ice. Back home he joins his friends watching cricket on television and falls asleep,loudly dreaming that he has been knighted for his services to the game. He wakes up to general derision and the knowledge that he has been exposed for stealing the eggs from next door's hens.

Alf is spending Christmas in hospital for a hip replacement but his visitors' scare stories of what could go wrong propel him into fleeing from the ward dressed as a woman - which incurs a drunk's unwanted attention. Back at the house he is outraged when Mrs Hollingbery's sister turns up after his room, being told that he is not expected to live, but all is forgiven when Mrs Hollingbery invites everybody upstairs for a Christmas party. Unfortunately he has forgotten the loose stair rod and ends up back in the hospital.