Holiday Snaps

"Holiday Snaps" is a cross-Channel cooperation story with a concrete, readable centre: a holiday photograph album. A Jersey couple, Tony and Janet Morel, are camping in France when Janet is stabbed to death in her tent in the night. The French magistrate wants Tony, the husband, back in Jersey; Inspector Maurice Dupont — played by Jean-Paul Roussillon, in one of the series' recurring French parts — is not satisfied, and asks Bergerac to help prove that the tourist from Jersey killed his own wife while on holiday.

The photographs are the key. Tony is a keen photographer, and his snaps of the trip become the evidence: the angles, the timings, the careful omissions. Nick McCarty's script builds the case the way a lawyer would, from small inconsistencies, and Ben Bolt directs with a clean, procedural feel. Pippa Guard plays Janet in the flashback material with enough warmth to make the murder land, and the Morels' world — a seafood market, a marriage where Janet made all the decisions, a husband the neighbours describe as a non-entity — is sketched with economy.

The episode is interested in how a death abroad is investigated when two forces must trust each other, and Bergerac's role is to confirm or break Dupont's case from the Jersey side. The holiday setting gives the hour a quiet, sunlit surface that makes the violence underneath it more disturbing — the same trick the series used in its wartime episodes, applied here to a marriage rather than a war.

It is a competent, neatly built hour rather than a standout. The holiday-snaps device keeps the mystery concrete, the French strand gives the series its familiar international texture, and Roussillon's Dupont is a pleasure throughout. A solid mid-season entry that shows the third series could handle a cooperative inquiry without over-complicating it, and a reminder that in Bergerac, the camera never lies — it just needs the right detective to read it.