Fall of a Birdman

"Fall of a Birdman" gives the second series its most distinctive setting: a television commercial, a hang-glider, and a murder that looks like an accident. Charlie Hungerford is overseeing the filming of an ad for his new Jersey julep, Mitarello, on his yacht. The star of the sequence is Antonio Corillo, a Portuguese hang-glider pilot hired to land on the boat. On the final take, he disappears over the cliff at Les Landes; when they reach him, he is lying dead in the water at the bottom of the rock face.

The marks on his neck suggest strangulation, and the discovery of his radio microphone in the grass seems to confirm it: someone was on the cliff with him. Paul Wheeler's script, directed by Ben Bolt, turns the gliding world into a closed community of its own — the director, the cameraman, the model waiting on the boat, the rival pilot with climbing gear in his wardrobe. Otto Jaschke plays Corillo with a quiet dignity that makes his death matter, and Norman Bowler and Bertil Loder fill out the edges of the shoot.

The episode is at its best when it lets the setting do the work. The cliff, the currents that carried the body from Les Landes round to Gorey Bay, the boot print and the dentist's appointment card — the investigation is a puzzle of small physical traces, and Bergerac assembles them with the patience the series was built on. The commercial world gives the hour a specific texture of money and vanity that suits Bergerac's Jersey, where everyone is selling something.

It is a contained, neatly framed hour rather than a showpiece. The murder motive, when it surfaces, is personal and small — the kind of crime that sits uneasily against the glossy commercial that was being filmed when it happened. Bolt directs the glide sequences with enough attention to make the physics of the fall readable, which is half the mystery. A quiet, competent entry that shows the second series could vary its settings without straining, and a reminder that in Bergerac, even the beautiful accidents have a witness.