Whatever happened to...?

Philip Stott

Shortly after his landmark performance in An Extremely Memorable Emergency, Stott started training to become a lawyer. He soon discovered that things were not going to be easy for him. The network of Freemasons running through the lawyering business had obtained photographic evidence of Stott mocking their ceremonies in a Scottish Masonic lodge using inflatable Daleks and thespy facial expressions; whatever he did, wherever he went, Stott found that his work was being thwarted. Although he was never able to pin it on the Masons, and although the people around him were superficially friendly and supportive, he knew that he was trapped in a hopeless situation.

Things were to get even worse. Arriving home from a difficult session of lawyering one evening, Stott discovered that his wife had been brutally murdered by a one-armed man. Yet when he reported the crime, the system of law that he had devoted his life to turned against him: he found himself accused of murder, tried and found guilty, and sentenced to death under new immigration laws established by Michael Howard’s Tory government (Howard himself suspected to be a leading Freemason).

But on his way to the gallows, the horse and cart transporting Stott was overturned by a steam roller from an Ealing Comedy. Joining forces with Stanley Holloway and Joan Simms, and directed by John Gordillo, Stott went in pursuit of the one-armed man for over 150 episodes, finally using his law connections to cleverly narrow down the potential suspects to two criminals, One Armed Jack and One Armed Harry. In a final twist, it turned out that the murderer had been hired by Dave Gorman, collecting material for his new show Dave Gorman’s Para-assassin Adventure, in which Gorman attempted to pin as many murders as possible on people with physical disabilities.

Stott’s harrowing experience was later made into the fourth Indiana Jones film.