The butterfly episode. First broadcast on 4 April 1985.
Del's latest get-rich-quick scheme involves DIY hair-cutting kits and louvre doors funded by Denzil's £2,000 redundancy money, which was manipulatively obtained by Del. After the doors are rejected by Brendan O'Shaughnessy, Denzil demands his money back and says that he's roped his brothers into helping him get it.
Rodney reads an article about a rare butterfly, and a butterfly collector's desire to catch it and pay a large sum of money to whoever brings it to him. Later, while hiding from Denzil's brothers, they spot the butterfly in the local cemetery. After a lengthy chase, Rodney eventually captures it in the lake of the nearby park.
He hands it to Del, but Denzil, after hearing that Del has got him his money back, skates by and gives Del a high five, squashing the butterfly.
Tropes:
- Butt-Monkey: Rodney, who gets his head partly shaved when Del demonstrates the "Home Hair Trimming Device" at the market, and later gets pushed into the lake by Del in order to capture the butterfly. Oh, and when he dies, he's going to be buried under a patch of stinging-nettles.
- Captain Obvious: Rodney, who points out that Brendan O'Shaughnessy is Irish.
- MacGuffin: The very rare Jamaican swallow-tail butterfly, which a collector is willing to pay £3,000 for. The Trotters actually capture it, only for it to be inadvertently destroyed soon afterwards.
- Noodle Incident: The way in which Del got Denzil to part with his redundancy money is not seen, just described by Rodney. Apparently Del chased him for over a mile and a half through Southeast London, managed to football-tackle Denzil when the latter was almost home, then force-fed him lager and frog-marched him to the bank. And then flogged him an electric DIY hair-cutting kit.
- Scary Black Man: Denzil's brothers, it would seem.
- Video Inside, Film Outside: While the series would normally follow this trope, here it becomes "Video Inside, Film and Video Outside" as the result of knock-on effects from Lennard Pearce's death earlier in the season. Because the production team had been forced to refilm nearly all the location scenes of "Hole in One", it left them without the budget to film the cemetery scene in this episode. The BBC agreed to cover the shortfall, so long as they did it on video instead of film, in order to keep costs down.
