by Mark Murton
Original Air Date: November 24, 1973
Directed by: Alan Wallis
Cat Out Of The Bag Alert! This review contains some spoilers for this episode.
Synopsis: Professor Sir Geoffrey Loftus (Ernest Clark) charges junior doctors Duncan Waring (Robin Nedwell) and Paul Collier (George Layton) with looking after his brown tabby cat, Thomas, while he and his wife (Joan Benham) are away visiting her sick mother.
Featured Feline: Duncan arrives at Sir Geoffrey’s to collect the cat. He soon realizes that the cat is a holy terror, scratching and biting every chance he gets. (In actuality, the cat actor couldn’t be more docile. Every time someone is supposedly attacked, the cat is just off screen and the actor must pull off the incident on his own.)
Back at the hospital, Thomas causes havoc in Duncan’s room before taking refuge on a pile of books on top of a cabinet.
Deciding it would be safer to keep Thomas in the lab with the other animals, Duncan and Paul capture him and place him in a cage there.
Later, hearing that Loftus is back and awaiting the return of Thomas, Duncan and Paul race to the lab, delighted to be getting Thomas off their hands, only to find the cage empty. They argue about where Thomas has gone before coming to the disturbing conclusion that he’s been taken to be experimented on. At the same time, unseen by them, Thomas sneaks out of the lab.
Fearing that Thomas must be deceased, they decide to take a similar looking cat from the lab to try and pass it off as Thomas. Outside the lab doors the real Thomas has once again taken refuge high up.
Having found a lookalike, they take the cat back to Duncan’s room.
The main problem they face is that this cat is a placid as Thomas was feisty, so Duncan tries to arouse its anger by impersonating a dog . . .
. . . and then a cat . . .
. . . but the cat just looks nonplussed.
They take the cat to Sir Geoffrey who isn’t at all convinced the cat is his Thomas, forcing Duncan and Paul to confess the truth.
Upset, Sir Geoffrey goes to “have a lie down” giving Lady Loftus the chance to tell them not to worry as she previously had to replace Thomas herself without her husband’s knowledge.
The next day at the hospital Sir Geoffrey is preparing to practise heart surgery on one of the animals from the lab but when Alan brings him the cat they took to his house the previous evening he refuses to experiment on it.
As Duncan and Alan discuss Sir Geoffrey’s behaviour they hear a cat crying and find the original Thomas in a box on a shelf and proudly return him to Sir Geoffrey’s home. The many scratches on their faces are proof of just how difficult this task really was.
Kitten Cattle Call: But it’s not just Thomas they bring but also her brood of five kittens. When they try to dump the kittens out of the bag onto the table they have some difficulty as the kitties are reluctant to exit.
Sir Geoffrey is stunned and as he struggles to understand, Duncan, with a wink to Lady Loftus, muses “Really sir, you a doctor and you can’t tell the difference between girls and boys.”
As the camera closes in on the kittens for the final shots under the end credits either the movement of the camera or the beginning of the live audience applause causes them to scatter in all directions as the actors desperately try and keep them in frame!
Final Mewsings: It’s not always easy to let the cats out of the bag!
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