Season 10 Episode 25: Torch Song Duet

May 19, 1996

Published 05/19/96

A sports radio quiz is giving away an all-expenses trip to the Atlanta Summer Olympics plus the honour of carrying the torch through the mall, and Al knows every answer. What he cannot do is call in, having been banned from the station over a remark he considers innocent and which the episode lets him repeat in full. So he feeds the answers to Griff, Griff wins, and Griff, who signs for the prize under the name Mr. X and introduces Al as a mute war veteran called Alfredo, becomes a local hero on Al’s knowledge.

The jealousy does the rest. Griff’s celebrity expands to a Big ‘Uns Man of the Year cover shoot, a romance with one of the cover models, and a torch relay through the New Market Mall with press in attendance, while Al watches a man he outranks in every category he cares about collect everything. The resolution is pure physics: Al tackles him, the torch goes into a fountain, and a reporter announces that the Olympic flame has been extinguished for the first time in three thousand years and the Games are cancelled indefinitely.

Bo Jackson plays the radio host, Calvin Farquhar, a name assembled from two of the show’s own writers, and the casting is a genuine coup: Jackson remains the only athlete to have been an All-Star in both Major League Baseball and the NFL. Richard Kline, familiar as Larry Dallas from Three’s Company, turns up as Big ‘Uns publisher Flint Guccione. The episode also contains the half-hour’s hardest-to-watch scene, in which Kelly asks permission to go to Las Vegas with a biker whose name she cannot recall, and Al, unable to react in front of a guest, takes it out on Bud instead.