They are rejected, so George buys a female Yorkshire terrier, whom Mildred names Truffles.
George is not happy when he realises that he is worth more dead than alive and he refuses to take out the insurance.
Ethel arrives in her "new bottle green automatic Jaguar XJ6", to talk to Mildred about their mother who is becoming too old to be left on her own.
Mildred's mother shows George a letter from her son Arthur in New Zealand, inviting her to live with him on his farm.
George plans to invite her to move in with him, in order to gain Mildred's favour and to make the rest of her family look selfish, with the intent of sending her to live with Arthur soon afterwards.
When the Fourmiles tell Mildred that one of the missing items is a carriage clock, she suspects that it is the same one that George gave her.
She changes her mind when Edward Rogers (Derek Waring), a charming sales representative, knocks at their door looking to rent a room.
At the pub, she sees Mr Rogers with a young woman, him telling her that he falsely claimed to Mildred that he is gay in order to deflect her advances.
While Mildred is cleaning, she finds an old case which contains many love letters written by George to somebody called Dorothy.
Jeffrey Fourmile is producing and directing the Hampton Wick Players' Christmas pantomime, Cinderella.
Ethel and Humphrey arrive for the evening of the performance, but by then, Mildred has fallen ill and lost her voice, leaving George to take her place.
Mildred invites people to her coffee morning, but the only guest who arrives is Ann, who is heavily pregnant.
Jerry tells George about a scheme to poach pigeons from Trafalgar Square to create a 'pigeon farm'.
George has very little money, so he thinks it a good idea to sell the house to raise the capital to back it.
George phones Gloria Rumbold, with whom he had a five-year nonsexual relationship when she was young, slim and soft-spoken.
However, he leaves before meeting her when he sees that she is now a plump, outspoken, middle-aged woman who works in a massage parlour.
George takes a job from Fourmile — advertising his company by walking along the street wearing a sandwich board.
At the hospital, the staff wrongly assume that George is her husband — and he faints whilst watching the birth.
George resigns from his job as a traffic warden, but tries to figure a way of avoiding Mildred discovering it, as he does not want to incur her wrath.
Jeffrey, Ann and Tristram Fourmile are attending a funeral, so they ask the Ropers to look after baby Tarquin for the day.
This displeases Fourmile who thinks that their sort should have a separate playground and is annoyed at Tristram speaking in a downmarket way recently.
When he buys Mildred a fur coat from Oxfam as an anniversary present, she assumes that he paid with the card.
Trevor Baxter, Roy Herrick, Ivor Roberts and Hal Dyer appear in this episode.
After George searches the pipes under the garden for his beloved fish, Mildred buys him two homing pigeons, but they fly away two days later.
It featured several guest stars including Stratford Johns, Kenneth Cope and Vicki Michelle.
It was to prove to be the former as Yootha Joyce died from portal cirrhosis of the liver due to chronic alcoholism on 24 August 1980, before the film was released.
Friends and colleagues were unaware that Joyce had been habitually consuming half a bottle of brandy every day for over 10 years.
Murphy also revealed that this was due to have been the final series of George and Mildred, as he and Yootha Joyce were afraid of being typecast after playing the characters since 1973 on television and in two films.
However, despite scripts being written, Joyce's hospitalisation and subsequent death brought a premature end to the show.
Thames Television did consider producing a spin-off for the character of George, looking at him cope with life as a widower.