Wheels of Fortune

Wheels of Fortune is a comedy of prophecy, and its writer, Anthony Horowitz, builds it like a puzzle. Harry is away, his 84-year-old Aunt Lill having had a stroke, and Ken is left in charge of the Coaching Inn. Among the guests is Phyllis Nichols, a well-known clairvoyant who wants peace and quiet to write her autobiography.

She does not get it. Word spreads that she is staying at the hotel, and a stream of visitors arrives bearing possessions of the dead, beginning with Harold Beamish, played by Roy Kinnear, and his late nephew's umbrella, in the hope that she can make contact with their owners.

Phyllis has a warning for Ken. He must not ride his motorbike. She foresees a crash, a great deal of blood, Ken on an operating table, and a policeman arriving at the hotel with bad news. Ken thinks it is nonsense, and with the other riders out on jobs, he takes a delivery anyway.

He is knocked off his bike by a speeding Ford Capri and escapes with bruises. The prophecy seems to have missed. Then, delivering serum to the hospital, he is asked to give blood for the victim of a serious road accident, and the blood and the table, the donor's couch, are accounted for. The casualty is Nick, the thief who stole Rocky's bike earlier in the episode.

That ties in the second strand. Rocky's bike was taken while he collected a package in the city centre, and it turns out he had also forgotten to renew its tax and insurance. The bike is recovered, undamaged. The policeman of the last prophecy duly arrives, with bad news for Rocky: he wants to talk about the insurance.

The third strand is Harry's, and it has a sharper edge. With ambulance drivers on strike, Aunt Lill's neighbours have to take her to hospital by car, and Harry vents his anger on the casualty registrar, Dr Hamill. She answers with a lecture on the finances of the health service and the strike's effect on deliveries of drugs and samples. Chastened, Harry offers Ken's couriers to the hospital free of charge, which is how Ken comes to be carrying the serum.

Horowitz, who went on to create Foyle's War, makes every thread meet at the hospital, and the satisfaction is in the fit. Geoff Husson directs. The fan site's cast list includes Sadie Frost as a nurse.

The weakness is that the mechanism is visible. Once Phyllis has made her four predictions, the audience can tick them off, and the episode's charm depends on the neatness of each payoff rather than on any tension about Ken's safety. IMDb users rate it the lowest of the second series.

But it is the cleverest piece of plotting in the run so far, and Harry's argument with the doctor is a reminder that the programme could find room for the politics of its time inside a light comedy.