Last Chance For a Loser

"Last Chance For a Loser" hands the first series to its most reliable comic asset: Charlie Hungerford, the antiques dealer with more optimism than judgement. A string of careful burglaries has been hitting the island's wealthiest homes — the Vances are robbed while Bergerac holds them up at a roadblock — and Charlie, played by Terence Alexander, is in the thieves' sights. Rather than report and wait, Charlie does what Charlie always does: he gets involved, and Bergerac finds himself policing his best mate as much as the criminals.

Philip Broadley's script uses Charlie as the entry point to a caper that is more organised than the usual island opportunism. The thieves — Joseph Grant and Ken Clifton, ferried by a colleague on a boat — are quiet, professional and targeted, and the contrast between their cold efficiency and Charlie's flustered indignation is the episode's comic engine. Ian Toynton, who handled the lighter Unlucky Dip, keeps the tone brisk and amused without losing sight of the fact that someone is methodically invading people's homes. Patrick Mower and Sarah Douglas bring weight to the criminal side, so the threat feels real even as the tone stays light.

Terence Alexander makes Charlie more than comic relief. There is a sadness under the bluster — a man who never quite made it, who treats a burglary as a personal insult because it punctures the illusion that he belongs among the people whose houses were targeted. Bergerac's fond exasperation with him is one of the series' warmest constants, and it carries the hour. The episode is about loyalty — Bergerac's to Charlie, Charlie's to a social circle he romanticises — and about the gap between the man Charlie thinks he is and the one everyone else sees.

If it lacks the political bite of the opener or the chill of the literary episodes, that is by design. This is the season's most purely enjoyable hour, a reminder that Bergerac's Jersey is a place where even a losing streak can be affectionate, and where the detective's hardest job is sometimes keeping his friends out of their own trouble. The burglary plot resolves cleanly enough, but the pleasure is in the company — and Alexander earns every minute of it.