Clap Hands, Here Comes Charlie

"Clap Hands, Here Comes Charlie" gives the second series its most purely comic hour, and the joke is on Hungerford. Charlie is standing for election as a deputy to the States, campaigning with a straight face while Bergerac watches in horror. Into the campaign walks Donald Early, an old boyfriend of Lil's from a decade past — now a sober, reformed journalist who claims he is on the island for a quiet visit and has stumbled on the story of a lifetime. The story is Charlie, and the source of it is a sea captain, Manuel Towers, who has chartered a tug from Hungerford's company for what he says is an oil survey off Africa.

Dennis Spooner, writing with evident affection for the series' roguish heart, builds the hour around the gap between Charlie's public campaign and his private dealings. The tug, it emerges, is not for an oil survey at all; Towers and his associates are smuggling, and the charter has Charlie's signature on it. Early, the reformed hack, is right on top of the story — and Lil, played with dry warmth by Iris Russell, is torn between an old flame and her friendship with the man he is about to destroy. Stefan Gryff plays Early with a quiet tenacity that never tips into caricature.

Michael Rolfe directs at a brisk, light pace that suits the material. The episode is comic in the way Bergerac was always best at comic: the laughter sits on top of a real threat. Charlie's vanity, his belief that he belongs among the respectable, and his habit of treating trouble as something that happens to other people are all on display, and Terence Alexander plays every inch of it without losing the character's underlying sadness. The election material gives the embarrassment real stakes — this is not a burgled house but a man's standing, publicly dismantled.

It is a useful change of pace partway through a darker season, and it keeps the friendship between Bergerac and Charlie alive in a series that increasingly needed it. The resolution lets Charlie off with his reputation dented rather than destroyed, which feels exactly right: he is a loser, but he is their loser. A gently comic hour that shows the second series could still make room for its most unreliable regular.