How to Succeed in Business without Really Retiring

Arthur's retirement has been coming for years, and it finally arrives the way most of his decisions do: because somebody says the wrong thing. Ray tells him Daley Enterprises is run on methods that belong in a museum. Hapless, an old business rival, keeps going on about the joys of retirement. Between the two of them they push Arthur into handing the keys to his nephew and walking away, and for a while the experiment looks good. The papers are signed in under an hour, which should have told everyone something.

Ray gets the business computerised, expands where Arthur would have hesitated, and makes everything look modern. But what Ray does not have is Arthur's hard-won knowledge of people, their habits and their little ways of telling lies. The lesson arrives in the form of a sting operation, and Ray is left with stolen jewellery he must explain, or get rid of, before it explains him.

Arthur, meanwhile, is going quietly mad. He is too mean to pay for a cruise, and a life of leisure turns out to be mostly sitting around waiting for the phone to ring with news of Daley Enterprises going wrong. It rings. He comes back to the business just in time to apply the old-school finesse that no spreadsheet can replace, and the mess gets sorted.

William Ivory and Leon Griffiths wrote it, Richard Standeven directed. George Cole is Arthur, Gary Webster is Ray and Glynn Edwards is Dave, with Sidney Livingstone as Bert, John Normington as Hapless, Liz Fraser as Delilah, Helen Masters as Janice, Colin Farrell as Alf, Lewis George as Bechers and Nigel Gregory as Harold.

The episode is a gentle experiment in subtraction: take the business away from Arthur and see what is left. The answer, apparently, is unbearable company for everyone around him. Retirement was never going to stick, and the show knows it. By the end, so does Arthur.