A Message For the Rich

The second series opens after a gap of over a year, and Robert Banks Stewart — the creator, back at the typewriter — chooses to put the series' most personal pressure on its lead. "A Message For the Rich" begins with a training exercise that looks like a raid, then cuts to Eric Honeyman, a former chauffeur to Charlie Hungerford, who has been fired along with his mother Beatrice, the housekeeper. The pair have their own idea of justice: they will confront Hungerford with knowledge of his dodgy dealings and make him hand over a year's pay. When public confrontation proves impossible — Hungerford is hosting a garden fete for a children's charity — Beatrice sends Eric to the safe. He takes cash, papers and a gold Egyptian necklace that belonged to Hungerford's late wife. And on his way out, he runs into Kim, Bergerac's daughter, and convinces her to leave with them.

The kidnapping of Kim is the engine of the hour, and it escalates everything the series had done before. Bergerac's daughter is not a case; she is the one thing he cannot treat with professional detachment, and the episode makes him work through the machinery of a police inquiry — roadblocks, briefings, the careful management of the Honeymans' demands — while privately falling apart. Alan Grint directs with a plain, serious efficiency that suits the material, and the script keeps the threat real: these are not master criminals but two angry, desperate people whose plan is coming apart.

The resolution turns on a test of Bergerac's judgement. The Honeymans are given a chance to end the situation without further harm, and the episode is careful to keep them human — victims of Hungerford's casual ruthlessness as much as kidnappers. When Kim is recovered, the triumph is muted; Hungerford's reaction to the affair is, characteristically, about his own loss.

It is a grave, effective opener that confirms the second series will be darker than the first. The premise is blunt but it works, and it puts the series' central relationship — Bergerac and Charlie, loyalty and exasperation — under the kind of pressure that would define the later years. Nettles carries the strain without spectacle, and the hour lands harder for it.