Miracle Every Week

"Miracle Every Week" takes Bergerac into a world the series had not touched before: faith, fraud and a young man's inheritance. Ravi Chavan, a faith healer of Indian descent from Hampshire, arrives in Jersey by ferry and is immediately accosted by Special Branch as a suspected vagrant. He is, in fact, the figurehead of the New Dawn Foundation, a company worth two million pounds — and he has just turned twenty-five, which means he now has the right to take charge of it. His accountant, Wyatt, and the foundation's chairman, Barry Hardaker, have other plans: Hardaker has been sending Ravi anonymous death threats to keep him in Hampshire, where his money stays safe from his own curiosity.

Saeed Jaffrey, one of the finest actors of his generation, plays Ravi with a gentle, watchful stillness that makes him the episode's calm centre. Robert Banks Stewart and Leslie Darbon's script is interested in belief and its exploitation — the foundation that funds a school and clinic in Ravi's parents' village in India, and the men who have been skimming the difference. Colin Bucksey directs with a tone that treats the healer seriously without ever endorsing the miracle: Ravi is a man of conviction being robbed by his own trustees.

Bergerac's role here is guardian rather than investigator for much of the running time — protecting a man who does not understand the danger, and unpicking a financial structure that would land the foundation's directors in jail if Ravi ever looked closely at it. The episode broadens the series' social range and gives Nettles a different kind of work, and the guest cast — Renu Setna, Nick Stringer, Nadim Sawalha among them — gives the foundation's world a convincing texture.

It is a decent, distinctive hour rather than a classic. The faith-healing setting is handled without mockery or credulity, which keeps the story grounded, and Jaffrey's quiet authority gives the fraud at the centre real weight. A mid-season change of pace that shows the second series could vary its subject matter comfortably — and a reminder that Bergerac's Jersey was never just one kind of place.