Dreamhouse

House-sitting for a pop star sounds like the softest job Terry has ever taken. Frankie Farrow, a name from the sixties, is away in Las Vegas on a night-club engagement, and someone needs to keep an eye on the dream house. Terry takes it, no doubt picturing gold discs and a pool. The job sounds better than it is, which should have been the warning. Then Frankie's brother Derek turns up, and the picture adjusts itself. The pool, as it turns out, is the least of the surprises.

But the Las Vegas night-club turns out to be a circuit of working men's clubs, and Frankie is not on the comeback trail. Frankie is broke, properly broke, in the way that means the furniture is about to become someone else's. The "dream house" is doing a lot of work, and the episode knows it. The bailiffs arrive at the dream house to repossess the lot, and Terry, hired to look after the place, gets to watch it taken apart by men with paperwork and a van. For a show that runs on scams, the absence of one here is the point.

Andrew Payne and Leon Griffiths wrote it, Tom Clegg directed. Richard Griffiths, before his later fame, plays Derek with a lovely kind of tiredness; Wanda Ventham is Beryl, and Roger Sloman, Dave Atkins, Sandy Ratcliff, Emma Garden, Ken Kitson and Niall Padden fill out the world around Dennis Waterman and George Cole.

The episode lets the sadness sit, which Minder doesn't often bother to do. The dream house was always just a house, and the pop star was always just a singer from the clubs. Terry sees it first hand, and for once there is no scam to fix it. And nobody, for once, tries to sell the dream back. It is not a laugh-out-loud episode, and it is better for it.