Plot
The episode begins with Richie placing his head in the oven in a suicide attempt. He has left a suicide note on the table for Eddie to read. It is revealed that this is in fact a ploy to guilt Eddie into buying him a drink. Eddie enters the room, places his suitcase on top of the note and proceeds to read the newspaper. When he notices Richie with his head in the oven, he is uninterested, and Richie relents.
It emerges that while Eddie has been out all day trying to claim his dole money, Richie has spent all day making an inexpensive dinner for the pair (everything has been grown, found or foraged), which turns out to be inedible. Eddie refuses to eat the dinner and reveals he has been denied his dole as he has too many savings - £11.80 which ought to last him two months - but he's "invested" the majority of it in a secondhand copy of Parade magazine. Eddie sits down to watch the Miss World contest on TV, but Richie refuses to let him. The two have an argument and Richie throws Eddie out of the flat. He then settles down to masturbate while watching Miss World. Eddie, who has been preparing to apologise to Richie, catches Richie in the act and agrees to keep it a secret if he is allowed to return and watch Miss World.
Later, Richie puts two and two together when he realizes that Eddie has only 30p left, and yet the Parade copy only cost £1.50 of his £11.80, which should leave him £10.30. When Richie confronts Eddie, he reveals he has also placed a Miss World bet. Richie is less than impressed when he finds out Eddie has placed the money on the hideous, apparently ancient Chinese contestant, as he felt the odds were so good.
The pair must then deal with changing a fuse when Richie breaks the television. In the ensuing chaos, Richie is electrocuted, burns his hand on the kettle several times (exclaiming "I didn't think the kettle would be hot!") and falls out of the window. When Eddie fixes the lights, he notices Richie is gone. Only now does he find the suicide note and assumes Richie has killed himself. After briefly mourning his friend, he begins planning to sell all of his possessions.
Richie returns and the two discuss their state in the world. Eddie states his philosophy on life: "You're born, you try to keep your head down and you die. If you're lucky." Their contestant loses Miss World, and Richie is further depressed. Eddie reveals that he never placed the bet anyway; he only claimed to have done it so Richie would let him watch Miss World. Eddie had instead spent the money on a "slap-up grill" as he saw Richie preparing "dinner" when he left that morning. Richie punches Eddie in the face and the episode ends.
Read more about this topic: Contest (Bottom Episode)
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—John Ashbery (b. 1927)
“We have defined a story as a narrative of events arranged in their time-sequence. A plot is also a narrative of events, the emphasis falling on causality. “The king died and then the queen died” is a story. “The king died, and then the queen died of grief” is a plot. The time sequence is preserved, but the sense of causality overshadows it.”
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—Robert Lowell (1917–1977)