One Reborn Every Minute

An American preacher, Rev Jedediah Marshall, is holding “Halleluiah, Praise the Lord” evangelical meetings at the Plaza Suite in which he heals members of the audience, apparently chosen at random. The sessions are sabotaged by hecklers and then by a strippergram. Jedediah wants Ken and Margaret to investigate who is behind the pranks. He says that he and another preacher are competing for a religious slot on a new cable TV channel and he thinks the other preacher may be staging a dirty-tricks campaign.

Harry invites his Aunt Delia, who suffers from severe arthritis, along to Jedediah’s meetings. She is called up to the front and Jed prays for her, “curing” her of her pain – but only for a couple of days. The doctor says it’s all down to her wanting to believe in the “treatment”... and endorphins, the body’s natural painkillers.

Margaret learns that Jedediah was responsible for another preacher, Luke Hennessey, being fired from a religious TV show in America. Luke has come to England and is now living nearby. He is the prime suspect for the sabotage. Ken and Margaret go to talk to him and find Jolene, Jedediah’s wife, with him. They deny that they are having an affair (they are “just good friends”) and Luke also strenuously denies that he is responsible for the stripper.

Rocky tracks down the stripper, Helen, at a pub. She tells him that she was employed by “a couple of Welshmen”. Ken discovers two men planting a stinkbomb at the Plaza Suite and chases them to a chapel which is run by a Welsh Baptist minister, Rev Cledwyn Pritchard. The sabotages are being carried out by Cledwyn’s brothers, Gareth and Owen, without his knowledge. It is Cledwyn who is competing against Jedediah for the religious TV channel.

During the next Halleluiah session at the Plaza Suite, Ken happens to be playing with a radio and hears Jedediah’s assistant, Lee, briefing him via a hidden earpiece about people in the audience and their ailments, which Lee has discovered by talking to them as they were arriving for the session. Jedediah is thus exposed as a charlatan and Cledwyn wins the TV slot.

This episode was due to be transmitted on 27 December 1988 but was postponed at the last minute and replaced with another episode because it featured a Christian spiritual “Gonna Go to Heaven on a 747” – by a horrific coincidence, Pan Am flight 103 had crashed over Lockerbie in Scotland six days earlier on 21 December 1988. See this account by Dean Friedman for the full story.

The version of the episode which was repeated by Carlton Select in the late 1990s includes the song, so evidently they bought the original version, not the overdubbed one that was transmitted by ITV on 10 January 1989.

Notes and episode list © Martin Underwood, 1998

Page last modified: 17 December 2008, 23:48