See You in Moscow

"See You in Moscow" takes Bergerac into the Cold War and has the good sense to laugh at it. A senior civil servant, Margaret Semple, vanishes, apparently defecting to Moscow via Jersey with her Russian lover. Colonel Measures of MI6, played by Bernard Gallagher, assumes the island is the usual staging post for defectors; Bergerac, whose day off and daughter's outing are cancelled, assumes he is being inconvenienced by idiots. The truth, as the episode keeps teasing, may be neither espionage nor loyalty but a woman fleeing her own life.

Sara Kestelman gives Semple a brittle, unpredictable edge — a woman who may not be the cold warrior everyone assumes, whose lover Gregori has already left her to travel separately, and who ends up locked in a room on a tomato farm, waiting for a boat to Brittany that may or may not come. Gerry O'Hara's script leans into the comedy of errors, and Don Leaver directs with a light touch that lets the absurdity breathe. Anthony Head, young here, long before Buffy, turns up as a plausible romantic complication — a reminder of how deep the bench of British television talent ran in 1981.

The episode is lighter than the arms-trafficking of the opener or the buried secrets of the previous week, and the variety is the point. Bergerac was never meant to be only a gloomy procedural; its lead is a man who resents being dragged off his holiday, and that indignation is fun to watch. The intelligence apparatus, all tight suits and tighter schedules, bumps awkwardly against the slower rhythms of island life, and the collision is the show's quiet joke.

The plotting is shaggy and the trail doubles back on itself more than necessary, but the tone carries it. This is an instalment about appearances — the defector who may be fleeing love rather than ideology, the lover who may be using her, the machine that wants a tidy file. Bergerac, as ever, is more interested in the person than the briefing. A breezy, entertaining hour that proves the series could wink at the spy genre while keeping its feet firmly on Jersey granite, and a palette-cleanser before the season's darker back half.