A Fridge too Far

The plan, as ever, involves money that belongs to somebody else. A consignment of mopeds for a client known as The Pizza Man needs funding, so Arthur pawns his wife's jewellery while she is on holiday, and then spends the lot on a lorry-load of fridge-freezers at a knockdown price. The Pizza Man's mopeds will have to wait. Arthur is now in the appliance game. It is the kind of deal Arthur describes as an opportunity and everyone else describes as a mystery. Somewhere between the pawnshop and the delivery, the money changed shape.

The freezers catch fire, which is a problem. Arthur's answer is the classic insurance job: stage a robbery, claim the money, walk away. The flaw is that real robbers turn up to do the very thing he is faking, and suddenly the claim has witnesses. Ray, as ever, identifies the intruders, and Arthur finds a way to make them pay for their timing. Then the real catastrophe lands: his wife comes home from her holiday early, and the pawned jewellery is going to need explaining.

Bernard Dempsey, Kevin McNally and Leon Griffiths wrote it, and Charles Beeson directed. George Cole and Gary Webster are Arthur and Ray, with Glynn Edwards's Dave in support. Linal Haft plays Mervyn Kravitz, Lesley Duff is Lucy Conti, Paul Reynolds plays Gino, and Che Walker, Tony Steedman, Shaun Dingwall and Jim McManus round things out.

The episode runs on a lovely irony: Arthur commits fraud by accident and is rescued from it by actual criminals. The fridge-freezers end up somewhere between a fire and a fight, and the real reckoning, the one with his wife, is simply not Arthur's problem yet. The freezer business was the easy part. The Pizza Man, still unpaid and still unseen, presumably has opinions. The mopeds, the freezers, the insurance: it is all one big money-go-round, and Arthur is trying to get off.