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Oliver's Travels
Oliver is a middle-aged lecturer in Comparative Religion, with a passion for trivia, crosswords, and anagrams, and a very strange taste in jokes. Having been fired from the University of the Rhondda Valley, and with no family ties, he decides to set off on a quest to find "Aristotle", a setter of crosswords. He soon teams up with Woman Police Constable Diane Priest, who has just been suspended from the police force because she has been asking too many questions about a local murder that seems to implicate the Chief Constable. Pursued by Baxter ("the man with no name"), Oliver and Diane visit Shrewsbury, North Yorkshire, Durham, Hadrian's Wall, and Kirkleven in the Scottish highlands on their journey to find "Aristotle" in the Orkney Isles. Along the way, they uncover a major scandal centred around a property company. The laconic humor and the laid-back style are similar in many ways to The Beiderbecke Affair (1985), The Beiderbecke Tapes (1987), and The Beiderbecke Connection (1988) (also by Alan Plater), but with the added pleasure of word puzzles like those in Colin Dexter's "Inspector Morse" books.
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Episode 1
Looking for Aristotle
Oliver is an eccentric professor of comparative religions at a university which is downsizing its humanities department. Now in forced retirement, Oliver, who is addicted to word games, puzzles, and anagrams, sets out in search of Aristotle, his favorite crossword puzzle compiler, but finds his Welsh home has burned down. When he reports Aristotle as a missing person to the police, he is considered a crackpot and assigned to WPC Diane Priest. In order to prove his sincerity to her, he researches the cold case of a murdered farmer and turns up evidence that her superintendent may be implicated in the unsolved homicide. When Priest confronts her superior with the evidence, she is put on suspension and conditionally agrees to accompany Oliver on his odyssey.
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0:45 Oliver's Travels: Vol. 2
