Relative Values

"Relative Values" is the season's tidiest mystery, and it contains one of the great 'before they were famous' guest turns in the series' history. The premise is a classic of the genre: an elderly millionaire, Henry Bernard, suffers a near-fatal bout of food poisoning after eating mussels collected with his housekeeper, Lisa Reynolds. His son Philip, flown in from London, is convinced Lisa is trying to kill his father — that the poisoning, and an earlier near-drowning on the beach, were attempts on an old man's life and fortune. Philip goes to Bergerac, who must decide whether the alarm is genuine or the paranoia of an estranged heir.

Geoffrey Bayldon, best remembered as the kindly magician of Catweazle, plays Henry with a splendid, penny-pinching oddness — a rich man who hoards, distrusts his son and lives in a badly maintained house next door to Hungerford. Warren Clarke, who would later find fame as Dalziel in Dalziel and Pascoe, is the resentful Philip; Maureen O'Brien completes the family. And as the housekeeper Lisa Reynolds, credited under her maiden name Lynda Marchal, is a young Lynda La Plante — years before she created Prime Suspect — giving the role a composed, unreadable stillness that keeps the audience guessing to the end. Peter Miller's script, directed by Martin Campbell with the same cool eye he brought to the Lister case, keeps the household under a mild, glittering pressure.

The pleasure of the episode is its containment. There are no conspiracies and no wartime wrecks, just a closed circle of people, a fortune, and the ugly things money makes relatives think. Bergerac works the angles with his usual mixture of charm and persistence, and the resolution — when it comes — lands with a satisfying click. The question of whether the threat is the housekeeper everyone distrusts or something closer to the family tree is held open long enough to earn its answer.

It is arguably the season's most confident piece of chamber drama, a reminder that Bergerac needed little more than a fortune, a few suspects and a patient detective to hold attention. If the ending is a little too neat for the messier realities of family greed, that neatness is part of the pleasure. A polished, entertaining hour, and the first glimpse of a writer who would redefine British crime drama.