Him Indoors

Arthur becomes a security consultant, which is like a fox offering to guard the henhouse and charging for the privilege. He recruits Ron the Burglar, a reformed thief whose main qualification is knowing exactly how the alarms fail, and starts selling systems to local businesses. The first installation is on Arthur's own lock-up, and it immediately malfunctions, trapping him inside for the night. It is his wife's birthday. The only attention he gets is from a zealous rookie cop who arrests him as a prowler.

Then the break-ins start. Premises fitted with Arthur's equipment are hit one after another, which does not look good, and Morley and Park begin taking an interest. Ron, working from a list of Arthur's potential customers, is robbing the warehouses himself. When Ray tries to stop him, Ron gets Ray arrested too. So Arthur, who has spent years being bailed out of trouble, has to bail out his own minder. The upside-down nature of the whole thing is the joke, and the episode plays it well.

Kenneth Colley is excellent as Ron, a man with a genuine gift for his trade and no moral objection to using it. Simon Rouse, Alex Lowe and Gareth Marks provide the police, and Antony Zaki is Imran. Iain Roy, Chris Kelly and Leon Griffiths wrote it; Roger Bamford directed.

There is a neat irony in Arthur's new career ending with his own alarm keeping him prisoner. You could say he got what he paid for. Arthur would say the system worked, and the burglars were the ones who believed him.

But the best moment is the bail. Watching Arthur stand in for Ray the way Ray has stood in for him a hundred times is the kind of role reversal this show did better than anyone, and it is worth the whole faulty alarm.