Why Pay Tax?

The favour starts small. Barry, an independent bookmaker, owes one of his punters a large win and has promised to settle it in cash, somewhere out of the way. He asks Terry to ride along, which should make it a five-minute job, all handover and handshakes. Instead they end up in a deserted car park with no crowd and no witnesses, and Terry is halfway through the handover before he realises what he's actually there for. Barry stages a fake robbery, a performance designed to convince the insurance company that the bookie was robbed, when in truth he's simply broke.

It's a neat little con, and you can't help feeling Arthur would have been proud of it if he'd had the idea first. Michael Medwin plays Barry with a silky, sweating charm, and the empty car park does most of the work, letting the deception unfold in plain sight while Terry stands there catching on in his own time. Nigel Davenport's Ray and Kika Markham's Dolly fill out the edges of the story, and the pub scenes give the piece room to breathe before the car park closes in.

Leon Griffiths wrote the script and Roy Ward Baker directed. Dennis Waterman plays Terry with George Cole as Arthur, and the rest of the cast takes in Michael Medwin as Barry, Roger Brierley as Cyril, Ronny Cush as Ram, Shay Gorman as Forman, Peter Machin as a doctor and Cecil Cheng as Mr. Wong.

The trick itself is as old as bookmaking, but the show always knew how to make a small dishonesty feel like a grand caper. There's a grubby satisfaction in watching Terry get pulled into somebody else's fiddle and walk away no richer, and the ending lands with a shrug rather than a lecture. And you suspect he'd take the same favour next week anyway.