One Flew Over the Parents' Nest

With Ray's parents on holiday in Spain, the family taxi is doing the rounds with Ray at the wheel, and the fare he picks up is Susie: attractive, plausible, and claiming to be on the run from a violent husband. Arthur hears the story, scents a nice little earner, and installs her in Bert and Doreen's empty house. Arthur calls it hospitality. The law will call it a business. Ray, to be fair, is mostly driving; the scheme is all Arthur's.

Susie, it turns out, is not a market researcher and never fled anything. She is a high-class prostitute, and the gang of heavies and the police both want her. The heavies want her for reasons of their own; the police's version of wanting her lands Arthur with a charge of running a brothel. Nobody pauses to ask why a market researcher is so keen on a stranger's house, which is the sort of question the show has never needed answered. It is a steep price for letting a stranger sleep in somebody else's bed.

Tony Hoare and Leon Griffiths wrote it, with John Reardon directing. Susannah Doyle makes Susie convincingly slippery, George Cole and Gary Webster do the Arthur and Ray double act, and Sidney Livingstone and Lill Roughley are the holidaying Bert and Doreen. Duncan Bell, Barry Aird, Tony Robinson and John Bowler support.

The title promises a madhouse, and the episode delivers one, but the real lunacy is Arthur's: a landlord who never checked his tenant's references. For once, his get-rich plan works exactly as planned, right up to the moment it becomes a crime. Susie vanishes, the heavies get nothing, and Arthur is left holding the lease and the charges. Bert and Doreen will have opinions when they get home. The house, at least, is still standing, which is more than can be said for Arthur's reputation.