On the Autofront

The gentleman's agreement between Daley Motors and the neighbouring dealership survives exactly as long as gentlemen are involved. Then the moneylender Don Gedley takes over the rival lot, the price war starts, and Arthur's sales fall off a cliff. His answer is advertising, and since proper advertising costs money he does not have, the ads go out on a pirate radio station with amateur announcers, one of whom answers to Cool K. It is the kind of station Arthur would normally call unlicensed nonsense, until the nonsense becomes his only hope.

Don is a fair man, but his son Grant is not. Grant, a young executive desperate to prove himself to his father, frames Arthur for driving a car through a shop window, which is a hell of a way to win a price war. Don, wanting peace and wanting his son out of trouble in roughly equal measure, offers to cover Arthur's fine if he pleads guilty. But Grant will not leave it there, and the dispute goes from commercial to physical. In the end Arthur and Ray team up with Don, of all people, and the pirates, to teach Grant the lesson his father will not. By the end, the fine is the least of Arthur's worries.

William Ivory and Leon Griffiths wrote it, with Baz Taylor directing. Godfrey Jackman's Don and Perry Fenwick's Grant make a properly uncomfortable father and son, Jim Carter is Tomkins, and George Cole, Gary Webster and Glynn Edwards hold the middle. Valentine Nonyela, Neville Watson, Ian Thompson and Soo Drouet fill out the neighbourhood.

It is a messy, satisfying episode about how quickly a price war becomes personal. And the sight of Arthur allying with a moneylender against the moneylender's own son is one of the better jokes the show ever told about the free market.