The Hood and the Harlequin

The first season closes on a tangle of romance and surveillance, and for once the romance is the point. Bergerac and Francine, his on-off love, quarrel over her flirting with Gene Beaumont, a French-Canadian photographer hired by the tourist office; meanwhile the French Surete has tipped the Bureau that Annie Escales — girlfriend of a wanted gangster, Jacques Tabouis — is on her way to Jersey. Bergerac is told to tail her and hope she leads him to the crook. The two threads pull him in opposite directions, and the episode is as much about Bergerac's private life as his professional one.

Terence Feely's script gives the personal material more room than the earlier episodes generally did. The jealousy is real but unspoken; Beaumont is plausible rather than villainous; and Bergerac's surveillance work keeps being interrupted by the mess of his own feelings. Greta Scacchi, in an early role, plays Annie with a cool, watchful poise that makes her the episode's quiet centre — a woman moving through the island's edges, swapping clothes with a friend to lose the tail, and never quite what the watchers assume.

Roger Tucker directs with a lighter, almost romantic touch appropriate to a Christmas-period broadcast, and the island looks its most attractive — low winter light, empty beaches, money moving through a small place. The gangster plot is serviceable rather than surprising, but it gives Bergerac somewhere to be while the emotional story does its work. The question, by the end, is less whether he catches Tabouis than whether he and Francine survive the misunderstanding.

As a finale it is deliberately modest. After the wartime ghosts of the previous week and the family pressure before that, it steps back to the human scale, reminding us that this detective's hardest cases are sometimes the people he loves. It is not the strongest hour of the run and the two strands never fully fuse, but it ends the season on a recognisably Bergerac note: a man good at his job and hopeless at his heart. A fitting, slightly wistful close to a first year that had found its voice early and never lost it.