The Roof of all Evil

There is a boom in satellite dishes, so Arthur buys a job lot of them, and the instructions are in German. This is where he calls in Logie Lawson, a self-trained electronics expert, on the theory that any man who can fix a television by intuition is clearly the man for a roof and a foreign manual.

The first installation goes to the wrong house entirely, which annoys the actual house owner. But the second job is less optional. Arthur and Logie are hired to fit a dish on the home of Fingers Rossetti, an Italian businessman with a very bad reputation and a very short temper, whose offers are famously not to be refused. The installation goes badly wrong, and Arthur and Logie end up stranded on the roof, with Logie's fear of heights making a bad situation considerably worse.

Meanwhile, Fingers' daughter has asked Ray to play Cupid. Her father dislikes her boyfriend, which puts Ray in the position of charming a man who is already furious about the state of his roof. The episode is a tower of small disasters, each one propping up the next, until Arthur and Logie are rescued and Ray has somehow survived being everybody's favourite and nobody's friend.

William Ivory and Leon Griffiths wrote it, Gordon Flemyng directed. George Cole is Arthur, Gary Webster is Ray and Glynn Edwards is Dave, with Pete Postlethwaite as Logie, Philip Locke as Fingers Rossetti, Liza Walker as Isabella, Kevin Dignam as Steve, Simon Molloy as the House Owner and Andrew Andreas as the Waiter.

Satellite dishes were the 1990s answer to a gold mine in Arthur's eyes, and the episode earns its comedy from the gap between the dream and the reality of a windy rooftop. Postlethwaite's Logie is the best thing in it: a man whose expertise ends exactly where the ground does.