Keep It in the Family

The self-contained ground floor flat at 33 Highgate Avenue becomes vacant when the Rush family's sitting tenant, elderly Arthur Fenston, dies. After the funeral his relatives arrive to pick it clean of his possessions. While Jacqui and Susan plan a party [to celebrate the simple fact that they can have one without the police being called], their father Dudley sets his mind to finding a new tenant. With a little help from their friends, David and Angela Jones, the girls hatch a plot to secure the flat for themselves.

Dudley is in bed with a broken bone in the ankle following an abortive attempt at disco dancing on roller-skates. It could have been his neck, if he hadn't landed on the fat Miss Bunting. Meanwhile, Susan is job hunting, and her father finds one for her in the local newspaper for a dentist's girl Friday. He writes the telephone number down on a piece of paper, but Susan inadvertently rings Duncan's number which is written on the other side, causing his secretary, Marlene, to resign. Dudley takes a stab at 'spot the ball', and receives a bank statement which shows £75,000 in his and Muriel's joint account.

Dudley and Muriel play a game of Cluedo to decide who'll do the washing-up, whilst waiting for daughters Jacqui and Susan to return home from an evening out with their respective boyfriends. Meanwhile, Duncan has had a new telephone answering machine installed in his office, and Dudley embarks on a campaign to drive him mad with garbled messages. Susan's beau, Matthew, has just gotten his own flat, and she is contemplating moving in with him. Jacqui introduces her parents to her intellectually superior boyfriend Clive, whom she announces will be moving into the ground floor flat with her as soon as her sister moves out! Duncan calls in an engineer, Arnold, to service his answering machine, and dumb secretary Marlene develops a crush on him; unfortunately for her, he turns out to be gay. Matthew's father, a Church of England vicar, arrives at the Rush house to discuss the infeasibility of mixed flat sharing on church property.

Whilst Dudley attempts to service an alarm clock, Muriel borrows Duncan's brand-new £300 camera to take some photographs of Jacqui and Susan to send to her mother is Australia. Susan reads an article by a woman who claims she can speak to the dead and thinks it quite possible she could be a medium herself, trying to foretell her sister's future with the aid of a dead light bulb. They go shopping with their mother whilst Dudley takes a sly kip instead of working on his cartoons, and return home to find burglars have gotten in through the window of the downstairs bathroom and ransacked the place. Muriel telephones the police, and Duncan pays a call. Muriel finds his camera has been stolen from the bun tin where she hid it from Dudley, but bottles-out of telling him. She suggests to Dudley that they buy him a new one, and claim the money back on their insurance. A good-looking policeman named Rodney - who previously gave Dudley a ticket for parking his car on a double yellow line outside

Muriel has gone to Australia on holiday to visit her mother, leaving Dudley in the care of their daughters. Jacqui has started a new job at Stanley Barlow's bookshop, leaving Susan at home to prepare meals for their father, although her cooking leaves much to be desired. Growing tired of the complaints, Susan suggests to her sister that they find their father a housekeeper. Duncan, meanwhile, is having problems with a jammed filing cabinet, and likewise hits on the idea of getting Dudley a housekeeper so that he can concentrate on drawing his cartoons; he finds one in Madge Carew, the bullying wife of handyman Arthur Carew. Susan engages a pleasant woman named Elsie Bates from an agency, whilst Dudley - not to be outdone - also engages a housekeeper; an attractive Swedish blonde named Ingrid. Chaos ensues when the three females meet and argue over the position.