Prime Target

"Prime Target" sends Bergerac to France and back, and the journey gives the series its first real taste of the international frame it would use for the rest of its life. A man is found dead in a grain silo near Dinard, dressed in Jersey clothes, wearing a wig; the local inspector, Maurice Chazottes, an old friend of Bergerac's, asks for help. The trail leads through the casino at Dinard — where Charlie Hungerford is playing host to Naomi Van Stratton, a woman who has just won heavily — and back to Jersey, where a sketch of the dead man appears in the local paper.

The dead man, it emerges, is connected to the Van Stratton story: Naomi, who was tried decades earlier for the murder of her millionaire husband Max — acquitted on a self-defence story many never believed — is selling off her local businesses, and the man in the silo had something to do with why. Celia Imrie plays Naomi with a brittle, glamorous composure that keeps the audience uncertain how much of her history is act. Robert Banks Stewart and Robert Holmes — the latter a celebrated Doctor Who writer — co-write a script that moves confidently between casino, silo and island drawing room, and Henry Herbert directs with the steady hand he brought to the wartime wreck of the first series.

The episode is busier than its neighbours, and the cross-Channel structure keeps Bergerac working two jurisdictions at once. But the core is a cold case wearing a new corpse: Naomi's acquittal, the island's long memory, and the suspicion that the old murder was never solved so much as shelved. The wig, the empty pockets and the parking permit all resolve into a story about a woman who got away once and is trying to get away again.

It is a competent, international-flavoured hour that broadens the series' geography at the right moment, and it gives the second series a sense of scale without losing the island's gossipy intimacy. Imrie, at the start of a long career in character roles, is the episode's quiet centre. A solid entry that shows Bergerac could travel well.