The Great Fly-Tipping War

Two kinds of trouble arrive at the Kane manor this week, and one of them is rubbish. While the Paradise Club is being renovated, a pair of fly-tippers take a shortcut and dump the club's rubbish somewhere they should not. But Mad Max Wheeler, another gangland leader, takes it as a deliberate calling card, an insult to be answered. Danny is furious about the other matter entirely: material suggestive of kiddie porn is being transported through the manor.

The episode's comedy comes from the fly-tipping, and its darkness comes from the manor. The two strands never quite resolve into one story, but they share a tone: somebody is always treating somebody else's property as their own.

John Bardon's Mad Max Wheeler is a treat, all wounded dignity at the insult of someone else's builders' rubbish on his patch. The war that follows is fought with the usual gangland vocabulary, but the grievance at the bottom of it is a skip full of rubble. Reg Pyke and Arthur Burns hover on the edges.

The kiddie porn material is handled the way the show handles everything ugly: it is the reason Danny is angry, not the subject of the story. The episode knows which of its two plots is fit for comedy. The rubbish war is fought out in the street, the other business behind closed doors, and the show is comfortable with both.

Jeremy Burnham and Murray Smith wrote it, Derek Banham directed. Don Henderson, Leslie Grantham, Barbara Wilshere, Peter Gowen, Leon Herbert, Kevin Short, Jack Galloway, John Bardon, Aaron Harris and Ivan Kaye make up the cast.

It is one of the dafter premises the show came up with, and it knows it. A war fought over a pile of rubbish, with the ugly stuff underneath, is very much this series in miniature. And it is also a reminder that the show's comedy always has a price tag.