FAMILY PLANNING

—Have a biscuit——the eternal Lunghi family greeting—and listen to the latest adventures of Bath’s most intimate detective agency (Family Business, 1995). Angelo Lunghi, visiting a dress shop whose owner is being harassed by dirty-looking young women scaring off her customers and extorting money for leaving her alone each day, picks up a second client who’s trying on a dress: Esta Dumphy, whose beeper keeps picking up messages to call 999. Meantime, the family firm’s been hired to help clear Winston Foxwell, a lottery winner who was perhaps too vehement in his opposition to a right-of-way that sliced through his late uncle’s yard, from the charge of murdering said uncle and burying him in the spot the earth-movers dug up. As usual, though, these crimes are continually upstaged by sitcom family intrigues. What will happen when Angelo’s son David forges his mother’s name to a medical excuse from school and, out on the prowl, falls for one of the Dirty Girls? Or when Angelo’s daughter Marie gets picked up, together with the ex-con who’s been importuning her and her friend Cassie to do something a little questionable? How serious is the latest boyfriend of Angelo’s sister Rosetta? Is his brother Salvatore really involved with an undertaker, as Mama Lunghi insists? Gentle family fun, heavy on the charm, shapeless as the velveteen rabbit. The Lunghis’ approach to family planning is about as efficacious as the Catholic Church’s.