A Touch of Eastern Promise

"A Touch of Eastern Promise" is a business story dressed as an episode of Bergerac, and it is exactly the kind of hour the series could do in its sleep: Charlie Hungerford and a group of Jersey businessmen invite an Arab entrepreneur, Zaki Mansoor, to the island in the hope he will invest in a leisure complex. The complex — Seaview World, a resort at Belle Vue Cove with a retractable dome — is Charlie's latest grand scheme, and Deborah is against it, seeing it as the overdevelopment of the coastline she cares about. Bergerac is drawn in not by crime but by the gap between the welcome extended to the investor and what is actually happening behind it.

Brian Finch's script gives the hour a different cultural register than the season's other stories. Mansoor, played by Kevork Malikyan, is not a simple dupe: he is a legitimate businessman at home, involved in a scheme that could land him in prison and cost him a hand if he returns — and the men courting him, including a vice-consul with his own interests, want him gone. Christopher King directs at a measured pace that suits a story about a deal and its hidden costs.

The episode is one of the season's smallest-cast hours, and it uses the business courtship as a contained world. The central tension is political and financial rather than violent: the government that wants no scandal, the investor who cannot go home, and Charlie, oblivious, selling his dream of a dome over the bay. Bergerac's role is to see through the hospitality to the problem underneath — and to decide whose side the island's interest is on.

It is a quiet, competent hour rather than a classic. The leisure-complex scheme gives it a concrete local stakes, and the guest cast — Jamila Massey, Azad Ali and Malikyan — gives the proceedings a texture the boxing or auction stories lacked. A steady entry that shows the third series could build an episode around a business proposition and its costs, and a reminder that Charlie's schemes were always a step away from disaster.