A Tethered Goat

Arthur loans Terry out for what he sells as an easy three-day job: bodyguard to Bassam Sayin, a Lebanese commodity broker with money to burn. Arthur sees the arrangement as a chance to exploit the client for a little extra on the side. But Terry, who has heard this pitch before, takes the job with his suspicions already up, and he's right to have them. Nothing about Sayin's operation is as straightforward as Arthur's invoice suggests. It never is.

The pair are soon in well over their heads, drawn into a world of high-stakes dealing where the security work is the least of it. Terry keeps his eyes open while Arthur, as ever, keeps his hand out, and between them they manage to make a dangerous situation considerably more complicated. One man is watching the door, the other is working out the angles, and both of them discover the door leads somewhere they didn't expect. Sayin has the calm of a man who knows something the people around him don't, which is never a good sign when you're the one being paid to stand near him. A tethered goat is bait, in the old saying, and somebody here is the bait.

Lee Montague makes Bassam Sayin a proper enigma, all smooth surfaces and no tell, and the support around him is strong: Kenneth Griffith's Dai Llewellyn, Michael Sheard's Elliot, Nadim Sawalha's Sardi, Jenny Lee Wright's Frankie, Johnny Shannon's George, Mohammed Sultan's Asif and Ian Collier's police sergeant.

Murray Smith and Leon Griffiths wrote it, James Gatward directed.

The title is the giveaway. Somewhere in this story someone is tethered, and it takes the pair most of the hour to work out that it might be them. Early Minder at its best: a simple job with a slippery client, and the creeping feeling that the simple jobs are the dangerous ones.