Too Many Crooks

Arthur's latest venture, Daley's Catering International Cuisine, has landed a police retirement party, which should be the safest job in London. It is not. The chef is Henri, a Frenchman who has made the mistake of getting a gangland boss's daughter pregnant, and when the Meadows family come up from Birmingham to collect him, Henri goes on the run. Arthur is left holding a banquet with no kitchen. He has employed Henri in good faith, which is the sort of mistake he makes twice an episode.

Billy Meadows, the boss, is in London for a meeting with his estranged brother Vinnie. Henri is found, kidnapped and returned to Birmingham for what sounds like an enthusiastic shotgun wedding. It is meant to put things right for Sadie, though nobody asks what she thinks about it. And because Arthur cannot have a simple disaster, a police superintendent at the retirement party is admitted to hospital with what looks like food poisoning. Nobody can prove it was Arthur's canapés. Nobody has to.

Trevor Byfield is Billy Meadows, David Sibley is Vinnie, Susannah Corbett is Sadie, the daughter in question, and David Marrick is the unlucky Henri. Glynn Edwards, Nicholas Day and Stephen Tompkinson are on hand, and Tony Jordan and Leon Griffiths wrote it, with Alister Hallum directing.

The joy of it is the collision between gangland revenge and a retirement buffet, with a shotgun wedding and a food-poisoning scare thrown in. Every plan in the episode is built on top of another plan, and none of them survive contact with the others. Arthur's catering is the least safe business in London, and he will never understand why.

But there is a sweetness under the chaos. The wedding, however forced, is happening, Henri is still alive to attend it, and Arthur has catered the most eventful police party in the history of the force. If only the superintendent had skipped the buffet.