Tim: I'd rather die...
Mr. Brittas: Let's not get melodramatic Tim.
Tim: No, that's what Gavin said. Oh my God...
— Tim Whistler recalling Gavin's last words to Gordon Brittas.
- Date First Aired: 10/02/1997
We begin on a beach, where Gavin's clothes have been strewn about. The rest of the staff comes across this, and Brittas concludes that he's drowned...
Cut to several days prior. Gavin is listening to a tape he lent off Helen. Unfortunately, he's also making a copy of it, which Brittas does not like, since he believes that Digital Piracy Is Evil. He promptly makes Gavin writes to the record company.
At the next staff meeting, Brittas announces plans for the next holiday, which is once again at the seaside town of Burbage-on-Sea. During this, Colin busts in and reveals that he's built the first potato-powered lilo, which he shows off to the staff. As they head off sometime later, Gavin gets a response back from the records company, who wants him to pay £10,000. That night, as he frets over how he's going to pay off that money, he decides to head out to the sea on Colin's lilo. Unfortunately, he doesn't come back and everyone believes that he has killed himself.
Back at the centre, Brittas starts preparing the funeral. However, he's not the only thing close to the staff who has died recently. Helen's pet cocker spaniel, Winston, has passed away as well, and Helen is distraught over it (although Brittas doesn't care). Afterward, as Helen is giving therapy to Tim, he reveals that the record letter company letter was a fake, created to teach Gavin to not be as such a slave to Brittas. On the bright side, Gavin is alive. On the downside, it's because he's been rescued by Ruthless Modern Pirates. Making matters worse, it's revealed that Gavin's parents were never told about his relationship with Tim, much to Tim's anger. Thankfully, he finds out that Gavin's alive. The bad news is that none of the staff believe him and lock him away in the centre as they head off to the funeral. On yet another bright side, Gavin is rescued by Interpol, who have been following these pirates for several years.
At the funeral itself, it doesn't get much better. Carole's keyboard blows up as she's trying to play it, and Colin's digging of the grave leads to Gavin's coffin shooting out of his plot, revealing that Colin had put Winston in there. This farce of a funeral is then capped off by Gavin showing up to the funeral and asking who it's for.
Tropes in this episode:
- The Alleged Car: Aquatic variant. Colin's potato-powered boat still has a few kinks, with his demonstration leading to him falling off the boat.
- Anxiety Dreams: Gavin has them about being prosecuted for illegally copying a tape.
- Ash Face: Carole's face ends up covered in soot after her attempts to play a keyboard end with it blowing up.
- Attending Your Own Funeral: Gavin shows up at his funeral at the very end of the episode wondering who it's for.
- Beach Episode: This episode features Brittas whisking the staff off to their regular holiday at the fictional seaside town of Burbage-on-Sea, where Gavin takes Colin's potato-powered lilo for a ride and gets captured by Ruthless Modern Pirates as a result.
- Big Damn Heroes: Gavin manages to be rescued by the Interpol, who raid the ship he was captured on and drive the pirates away.
- Bound and Gagged: Gavin is kept quiet by Ruthless Modern Pirates this way.
- Burying a Substitute: An accidental variant. The staff Never Found the Body and want to hide this from Gavin's parents, so they use the cheapest emptiest coffin that they could find to bury him with. The trouble is it turns out that there was a body there... Winston, the family dog of Brittas and Helen.
- Cassandra Truth: Brittas and Julie does not believe Tim when he tells them that Gavin has been captured by pirates.
- Catapult Nightmare: Gavin flings awake after his Anxiety Dream and wakes up Tim.
- Character Development: Whilst previous episodes have depicted Brittas as absolutely despising the idea of lying, here, we see that he is now willing to lie if he sees that it can be done for the greater good. He even claims to have been taught by experience on this matter.
- Closet Gay: It's revealed that Gavin never wrote about Tim or his relationship with him in his letters, with the implication that it's because he doesn't want his parents to find out that he's gay - his father is a retired army colonel after all who essentially cut his brother out of the family simply because he wasn't interested in the lifestyle.
- Confidence Building Scheme: Tim fabricates a letter from the record company as part of a scheme to try to get Gavin to stand up to Brittas more. Too bad it goes horribly wrong...
- Continuity Nod:
- During the trip to Burbage-on-Sea, Brittas is wearing the same outfit that he did when he was being interviewed back in "The Old, Old Story".
- Gavin is intended to be buried in the same plot that Brittas was intended to be back in "The Last Day".
- A Day in the Limelight: For Gavin, giving us an in-depth look at his relationship with his family and his life with Tim.
- Deadly Prank: Tim decides to play a prank on Gavin by fabricating a letter from the Record Company (since Brittas was making Gavin contact them for copying one of their tapes). This ultimately leads to Gavin getting captured by Ruthless Modern Pirates for several days and the staff believing that he had committed Suicide by Sea.
- Deadly Road Trip: The staff's trip to Burbage-on-Sea is cut short when Gavin goes missing and is believed dead.
- Digital Piracy Is Evil: How Brittas views Gavin's illegal copy of the tape which he borrowed off of Helen, leading to him making Gavin write a letter to the record company.
- Distressed Dude:
- Gavin becomes one after he gets captured by Ruthless Modern Pirates.
- Tim becomes one as well when Julie and Brittas tie him up in a chair to prevent him from going to the funeral. Last we see of him in the episode, he's calling out for help.
- Dream Within a Dream: Gavin's nightmare retroactively becomes this with the reveal at the end of the series that the show was All Just a Dream.
- Driven to Suicide: Brittas thinks Tim is planning this after he remembers Gavin's words of "I'd rather die" and says it out loud.
- Ending Memorial Service: The episode ends with Gavin's funeral after he is believed to have committed Suicide by Sea, although it is ultimately Subverted when he shows up partway through it asking who died.
- Fanservice: Gavin spends a significant portion of the episode shirtless.
- Fate Worse than Death: During his nightmare, Gavin is ordered to attend forty years of psychotherapy with Helen, to which he awakens exclaiming how he'd rather die.
- Felony Misdemeanour: The record company makes Gavin cough up £10,000 simply for copying a tape of theirs. Subverted when it turns out to be a prank by Tim.
- The Food Poisoning Incident: Helen thinks that Winston may have been killed by eating prawns that were four days past their sell-by date.
- Follow in My Footsteps: Apparently, Colonel Featherly cut one of his sons, Peter, out of the family simply because he was unwilling to follow his father into the army.
- Foreshadowing: Tim is apathetic to Gavin's record-company money woes in spite of the fact that it could lead to him having to sell the flat that they share, which serves as an early hint that the entire thing was just a prank by him.
- The "Fun" in "Funeral": Gavin's funeral goes poorly - firstly, Julie, in her efforts to buy a cheap coffin, buys a ridiculously small one, with her attempts to explain it just distressing Gavin's parents more. Then Colin's attempts to dig a hole lead to him hitting a water pipe. The pipe bursts in the middle of the funeral and sends the coffin shooting out, at which point, Gavin's parents discover that instead of Gavin in the coffin, it's actually Helen's pet dog Winston. And all before the actual person meant to be having the funeral shows up.
- How We Got Here: The episode opens with the staff discovering Gavin's clothes on a beach and concluding that he's drowned. We then flashback to a couple of days prior to see the events which led to this.
- Human Trafficking: In a Bilingual Bonus, the intention of the Ruthless Modern Pirates is apparently to take Gavin to Africa and then sell him.
- It's All My Fault:
- Subverted in Tim's case when it revealed that he was the one who wrote the Record Company letter, wanting to teach Gavin a lesson, only for Gavin to seemingly kill himself over it. When Helen tells him to not blame himself, Tim reveals that he's actually blaming Brittas, as he was the one who asked Gavin to write to the Record Company in the first place.
- Played Straight in Helen's case, as she initially believes that she killed Winston by feeding him out-of-date prawns. However, after listening to Tim blame Brittas for the apparent suicide case of his boyfriend, she decides to put the blame on Brittas for buying them in the first place.
- Killed Off for Real: Winston, the Brittas family's rarely-seen dog, dies in this episode.
- Killed Offscreen: Winston the dog dies off-screen and Helen tries to hide him in Gavin's coffin.
- Lots of Luggage: Carole brings way too much luggage with her.Mr. Brittas: Carole, what's all this?Carole: It's my luggage, Missbriss.Mr. Brittas: You're goin' away for the weekend, not emigratin'!
- Lost at Sea: Gavin after taking a trip on Colin's potato-powered lilo.
- Lost Pet Grievance: The Brittas' family dog Winston dies, and Helen is extremely broken up about it (although Brittas doesn't care).
- The Main Characters Do Everything: The staff decide to hold the entire funeral by themselves, under the justification that it's what Gavin would have wanted.
- Manly Tears: Tim is visibly crying as he looks at a photo of the staff, clearly affected both by the apparent death of his boyfriend and by the fact that said boyfriend had never told his family about him.
- Mistaken for Suicidal: Gavin reveals that he has been feeling depressed recently and has been ordered to pay up £10,000, so when he vanishes at sea, it is feared that he has decided to drown himself. In truth, Gavin was apparently just taking Colin's lilo out for a while to clear his head - the reason he didn't come back was because he was captured by Ruthless Modern Pirates.
- Nice Job Breaking It, Hero: Tim's supposedly harmless prank on Gavin leads to him getting captured by Ruthless Modern Pirates and everyone believing he was dead.
- Nightmare Sequence: Gavin dreams that the staff is finding him guilty for copying a cassette tape, leading to psychotherapy sessions with Helen.
- Noodle Incident: Apparently, this isn't the first time that the staff have been at Burbage-on-Sea.
- Omniglot: It's revealed that Gavin knows enough French to let him carry on a conversation with and understand the Ruthless Modern Pirates holding him hostage.
- One Dialogue, Two Conversations: Helen appears in the center apparently crying about Gavin. After some sadness between Carole and Helen, it is then revealed that Helen was actually talking about Winston, the family dog, who died that morning.
- One-Shot Character: Colonel Featherly, Enid Featherly and Peter Featherly.
- Practical Joke: It's revealed later on that Tim fabricated the record letter company letter partially as a prank and partially to teach Gavin to not be as much of a slave to Brittas.
- Reality Has No Subtitles: None of the French that both Gavin and the Ruthless Modern Pirates are speaking is subtitled for the audience, although Gavin's responses to them are enough to denote that whoever rescued him isn't friendly.
- Reports of My Death Were Greatly Exaggerated: Gavin is believed to have committed suicide at sea, when really he had been captured by pirates. At his funeral, he casually strolled up and asks if it was someone he knew being buried.
- Ruthless Modern Pirates: Gavin gets rescued and then promptly Bound and Gagged by one of these, after being lost at sea on a potato-powered lilo.
- Series Continuity Error: Apparently, Gavin is now 36 years old... even though "Playing With Fire" had established him to be about 24. note Granted, considering the fact that this was said by his mentally unstable girlfriend, this might be a case of Unreliable Narrator.
- Shout-Out:
- Tim mentions Gavin had a Daffy Duck bath toy.
- The movie shown on the Featherly's flight was It's a Wonderful Life, which is Gavin's favourite movie.
- Stuff Blowing Up: At the funeral, Carole attempts to play a tune for her seemingly departed co-worker Gavin. However, the keyboard proceeds to blow up, leaving her with a case of Ash Face.
- Suicide by Sea: The staff initially believe that Gavin has decided to drown himself in the sea when they find his clothes on the beach. In fact, he didn’t kill himself but was captured.
- Taught by Experience: Brittas claims that experience has reminded him that sometimes, lies have to be said for the greater good (in this case, deciding not to tell Gavin's parents that they Never Found the Body). It's possible that he learned it from "Biggles Tells a Lie", where not telling Stephanie that her father wasn't Manager inspired her to spread his Dream.Colin: You mean you've lied to Gavin's parents, Mr. Brittas?Mr. Brittas: I have learned by experience, Colin, that sometimes, and I stress only sometimes, we need to tell a small untruth in the service of a higher goal.
- Unconventional Food Usage: Colin has created a lilo which is powered by potatoes, which he demonstrates in the pool.
- Walking Shirtless Scene: Gavin is shirtless for over half the episode.
- What Happened to the Mouse?: Tim's two plotlines of knowing Gavin was still alive and him discovering that Gavin never told his family about their relationship never get resolved as Tim is locked away in the centre and never makes it to the funeral.
