Houseguests

Houseguests puts Ken and Harry under one roof for a weekend, with a robbery arranged behind their backs. A wealthy couple ask Harry to look after their country mansion and keep an eye on their antiques. He offers to bring Ken along, and the two men quickly find that living together is harder than it looks. They get on each other's nerves.

The friction is the comic centre of the hour, and it suits the way the series usually runs. Wikipedia's account of the programme says the comedy comes mainly from Harry's minor misfortunes and best-laid plans going awry, with Ken usually having to come to his rescue. Here the two men are shut in a stranger's house with nothing to do but guard it, and the usual division of labour breaks down: neither has a case to go out and solve.

The quarrel is brought to an end by something more serious. Ken begins to suspect that Harry was deliberately persuaded to leave his flat for the weekend, and that the commission to guard a mansion was a way of getting him out of the way.

When they return, they discover that Harry's flat has been used to gain access to his neighbour's safe. The couple's job offer was bait. A man whose trade is protecting other people's property had been sent to look after one house while the real target stood next to his own.

Peter Palliser wrote the episode, his second of the sixth series after Two Men in a Vault, and Mike Vardy directs. James Purefoy appears in the cast. The earlier episode left the two men alone in a vault; this one leaves them alone in a house, and both stories use CBS's own work, security, as the thing that goes wrong.

It is a neat idea. A security adviser whose flat becomes the route to a neighbour's safe is a comic and slightly humiliating position for Harry to be in, and the structure, in which the job he takes is the cause of the crime he is paid to prevent, gives the plot a clean shape. The title suits it well: the guests the episode is concerned with are the people who used the flat while its owner was out.

The risk in a premise like this is that the quarrel fills the middle of the hour and has to carry the story until the burglary is revealed at the end. It depends on how much Ken and Harry can make of each other's company, and Michael Elphick and David Daker, whose partnership the Guardian credited with audiences of up to fifteen million, are well placed to do it.