Uneasy Rider

The Daley Post gets off to the kind of start that should have made Arthur suspicious immediately. The phones ring, the jobs pile up, and suddenly London's newest dispatch service is swamped with customers. Ray, who has seen one or two of Arthur's schemes before, points out that it all looks too good to be true. He means illegal, and he is right. Arthur tells him not to be such a pessimist.

But Arthur has bought the equipment on the cheap, and the radios that keep his couriers in touch work only when nobody is in a hurry. The operation unravels in stages. The customers, it turns out, were never really customers. They belong to the Warnock brothers, and Arthur's riders have been innocently carrying the brothers' illegal work around London under the Daley Post name. On top of that, a crazed boyfriend turns up, the boyfriend of a model whose nude photographs have ended up in Arthur's keeping, and he is not the sort of man to let that lie.

It falls to Ray to untangle the mess, and he does what Arthur's enterprises have always needed: he turns the tables on the Warnocks and pulls the business back from the edge of becoming a proper crime outfit. It is not the first Daley scheme to need a rescue, and it will not be the last.

Geoff Rowley and Leon Griffiths wrote it, Diarmuid Lawrence directed. George Cole is Arthur, Gary Webster is Ray and Glynn Edwards is Dave, with Nicholas Day as Morley, Jonty Stephens as Field, Ben Chaplin as Conway, Ian Bartholomew as Ralphy, Nick Dunning as Keef, Brian Hibbard as Rabbit and Elaine Lordan as Trish.

The pleasure here is watching Arthur's pride in his legitimate venture survive contact with the reality of who is actually paying for it. The Daley Post is a legitimate business the way Arthur is a legitimate businessman: it looks right from across the room.