The Smaller They Are...

Scotch Harry, never the sharpest knife in the drawer, goes to the airport looking for easy pickings and finds them: a suitcase full of banknotes, lifted from the terminal without a hand laid on him. It should be his lucky day. But the police are on his trail, and worse, the notes are forged. Everyone in London seems to want the case, and nobody wants it for the same reason.

The case belongs to a gang of international counterfeiters, who are not the forgiving type, and they join the chase. Arthur, ever the fixer, agrees to broker the suitcase's return, minus his expenses, and hides Harry while he sounds out the rightful owner. The only people in a hurry are the counterfeiters, and they are not negotiating.

Terry, meanwhile, is the one who has to keep Harry alive and Arthur solvent while a city-wide chase builds around a bag of very bad money. He ends up doing the running while Arthur supervises from a safe distance, which is the usual division of labour. Phil McCall makes Scotch Harry a lovely study in misplaced confidence, and Hans Meyer's Maurice Bonnet is the sort of continental heavy who never has to raise his voice. There's a neat comic cruelty in watching a man who thought he'd struck it rich carrying the one bag in the airport that belongs to people like Bonnet. David Jackson's Big Stan, Peter Childs's D.C. Rycott, Osmund Bullock's Brian, Sue Vanner's Kim, Glynn Edwards's Dave and Chris Jenkinson's Eric fill out the sides.

Leon Griffiths wrote it, Roy Ward Baker directed, and the whole thing moves at a decent clip, a chase story with the brakes squealing on every corner.

The title promises a fall, and the episode delivers one, though not necessarily for the man you'd bet on. Harry's mistake, after all, wasn't stealing the money. It was stealing the wrong money.