The Car Lot Baggers

A builder wants a piece of land that belongs to a car dealer, a friend of Arthur's, and he has hired a gang of thugs to make the point. It's a textbook piece of villainy, picking the scapegoat first and finding the crime later. The intimidation is designed to look like the work of the local gypsies, with the added benefit that respectable people won't look too closely at who's really behind it. Arthur's involvement is, as ever, a mixture of bad luck and worse judgement. He is in the middle of the whole business, doing his usual impression of a man who stumbled into trouble while looking for a profit.

The accusations against the gypsies don't hold, and it's their people who end up helping Terry when the truth surfaces. The real villains turn out to be supposedly respectable businessmen, and there's a proper confrontation at the end, with Terry doing what he does best and the men behind the harassment getting their comeuppance. Meanwhile Arthur is being pursued by a merry widow called Tilly, a pursuit he tolerates because her funeral parlour is the perfect customer for the hearses he's trying to sell.

Trevor Preston and Leon Griffiths wrote it, Francis Megahy directed. June Whitfield plays Mrs. Murdoch, Jimmy Nail is Nathan Loveridge, and Patrick Malahide appears as Chisholm with Glynn Edwards as Dave. Antony Scott plays Wally, James Faulkner is Apsimon, Colin Jeavons appears as Fribbins and Christopher Benjamin as Mr. Rushmer. Dennis Waterman and George Cole lead.

There's a neat reversal at the heart of it, with the suspected villains turning out to be the heroes and the respectable faces turning out to be the problem. The episode keeps its sympathies in the right place, which is with the people the respectable men were happy to blame. The hearses give Arthur one of his better schemes, pure business logic applied to the grimmest possible stock. But it all resolves with the familiar banter intact, and the gypsies can go back to being blamed for nothing in particular.