Trick or Treat

Addressing the studio audience, Stephen Fry announces that he and Hugh Laurie will show the right and wrong ways to handle children who come trick-or-treating on Halloween, pausing for a plug of the episode's sponsor, Tideymans Carpets. In the wrong way, Laurie greets two costumed boys warmly and chats with them about football while Fry fetches a bag of jelly beans, and the boys leave happy. In the right way, the pair meet the same boys with baffled indignation, insist the custom belongs in America rather than England, and haul the children away over their shoulders. A Tideymans advertisement follows, with a blond-wigged Laurie crouched on a carpet beneath a tower block, explaining that the children would have survived their fall had they landed on Tideymans shag pile a few feet further to the right.

One of several sketches in series 2, episode 2 built around the episode's fictional sponsor, Tideymans Carpets; the Tideymans advertisement that closes this sketch pays off that running gag.