Broken Arrow

Arthur spots Dafydd playing darts in a local pub for peanuts and sees a champion nobody else has noticed. The boy is Welsh, young, and unhurriedly brilliant at the oche, so Arthur enters him for a proper contest. That attempt ends when Dafydd gets nobbled mid-game. Arthur, rather than sulking, does what any sensible businessman would do and buys the whole event. He'll organise the tournament himself, manage Dafydd, and arrange the finances so that whatever happens, he comes out ahead.

The snag is the prize money. Very few people want to enter Arthur's tournament, and scraping the purse together turns out to be harder than the scheming that produced the idea in the first place. There's a lovely tension throughout between the serious business of throwing arrows and Arthur's cheerful certainty that sport is just commerce with a scoreboard. He has worked out a way to make money no matter who wins, which may be the closest Arthur ever comes to honest planning. Sean Mathias plays Dafydd with quiet dignity, while Edward Peel's Ted, Maggie Steed's Sherry and Glynn Edwards's Dave orbit the scheme with agendas of their own.

George Day and Leon Griffiths wrote it, Roy Ward Baker directed. Alongside Dennis Waterman's Terry and George Cole's Arthur, the cast includes Michael Graham Cox as Wally, John Joyce as Eddie Pitt, Chris Johnston as Eric and Paddy Joyce as Pat.

Darts is a sport of small margins and steady nerves, which makes it ideal Arthur material. The precision suits him; he can count. Somewhere in the middle of all the counting there is a real sport going on, and the episode lets it breathe. But the episode is content to watch a good scheme strain at the seams and still land on its feet, and that restraint is part of the charm. Nobody gets rich, nobody gets hurt, and Arthur learns nothing whatsoever, which is exactly as it should be.