The Odds Couple

Lewis Nelson has a problem with his wife. Lorna is much younger than him and hopeless at staying away from the gambling tables, and she has run up serious debts at the casino where Lewis used to be the boss. He hires Ray to keep her out of the place. It is the kind of job that sounds easy and is not.

Lorna gets round the minder by persuading Arthur to gamble for her, with her money and her 'system'. The system is Lorna's idea, and Arthur treats it with the reverence other men reserve for the football pools. Arthur, who cannot resist a system, starts winning. Then the instructions go missing and the losses begin, which is very Arthur. Lorna escapes Ray's care and turns up at the casino anyway, and Ray and Arthur spend the episode trying to get her out before Lewis finds out.

Meanwhile Arthur has been collecting bin-bags of used cards from the casinos to sell on, and in one of them he finds a bag of cash meant for Lorna's debts. Arthur decides to return it in his own fashion, which means it comes back with something taken off the top.

Lee Montague is Lewis, Hetty Baynes is Lorna, and Joseph Long, Louis Hilyer, Neale Goodrum, Piers Ibbotson and Anthony May fill out the tables. Glynn Edwards is Dave. Tony Jordan, Liane Aukin and Leon Griffiths wrote it; Keith Washington directed.

It is a casino episode, all red velvet and worried faces, and it runs on the oldest Minder truth of all. Nobody involved, including the people doing the gambling, has any real idea where the money is going. Ray's job was to keep one gambler out of the casino. He ends up chaperoning two.

But the best of it is Arthur at the wheel, playing somebody else's money by somebody else's system. He has never looked happier, which tells you everything about the man.