The Last Video Show

Arthur opens a video shop, Daley's Videos, and installs Terry behind the counter. It looks like the quietest venture of their careers. Then a tape shows up that has no business being in the shop. It was shot by Jack Last, a big-time gangster, and it incriminates an officer in the Serious Crime division. Last had been using the tape to blackmail his way out of trouble, and now the only copy has been returned to Daley's Videos by mistake.

But every interested party converges on the shop. The police want the tape, and so does Last. Arthur, for a while, has no idea what he is sitting on, which is how Minder likes to play it. Ian McShane gives Jack Last the calm menace of a man who has never once been told no, and Rula Lenska is Sandra Last, keeping pace with him. Brian Blessed is Freddie Dyer, and Ray Winstone is Arnie, both bringing their usual volume to the proceedings. The gangsters arrive in ones and twos, and the shop begins to feel very small.

The video shop makes a good setting for a siege. One counter, one door, a wall of tapes, and half the underworld trying to get through it. Arthur's slow realisation that his quiet little business is sitting on dynamite is the best beat of the episode, and Terry's reaction to being the man at the counter when it all goes off runs it a close second.

Andrew Payne and Leon Griffiths wrote it, and Roy Ward Baker directed. Dennis Waterman is Terry, George Cole is Arthur, Glynn Edwards is Dave, Patrick Ryecart is Nigel, Peter Childs is Rycott and Garfield Morgan is Supt. Mason.

Arthur finally pieces together what the tape is worth, and from then on it is a race. The shop survives. Whether Arthur's nerves do is another matter.