Almost Like a Holiday

"Almost Like a Holiday" is a small, sharp story about stories — a mugging, a liar, and a burglary that the liar's publicity nearly undoes. Vincent Parkin, a guest at the Royal Barge with a gift for tall tales, claims everything from an old football injury to a war wound from El Alamein, and when he is mugged outside the hotel — his wallet stolen by the man he was spinning yarns to — the newspapers lap it up. The publicity makes Parkin a beloved figure: the lovable old fraud who was attacked in the street. But his fame threatens a plan to burgle a safe containing a fortune in diamonds, and Bergerac has to see past the sympathy to the crime being set up underneath it.

Alistair Bell's script is interested in reputation and how it distorts an investigation. Arnold Diamond plays Parkin with a twinkling, self-regarding charm — a man who cannot help embroidering his own life and who finds, too late, that his inventions have consequences. The mugger, Mitchell, stole his wallet; the diamond merchants and their associates have their own plans; and the collision of the old man's stories with the professionals' silence gives the hour its quiet comedy. Laurence Moody directs at a pace that lets the two layers sit side by side.

The episode is one of the season's most populated, and the size of the cast suits a story built around a public event and a private plot running beneath it. Patsy Rowlands, John Horsley and Tom Georgeson fill out a world of hoteliers, merchants and minor villains, and the series shows it could stage a more crowded story when the plot called for it. The diamond theft gives the hour a concrete stakes that the mugging alone would lack.

It is a workmanlike, entertaining entry rather than a landmark — a story about a liar who becomes, briefly, the island's favourite victim, and about the criminals who would rather he had stayed quiet. Bergerac, as ever, is the one person not taken in by the headlines. A steady hour that keeps the second series moving and uses its guest cast well.