A Cry in the Night

"A Cry in the Night" is written by Robert Holmes, one of the greatest names in British television science fiction — the man behind The Talons of Weng-Chiang and The Caves of Androzani — and it shows. The hour is a celebrity-world murder mystery with a genuinely strange texture. A rock star, Boy Buckley, brings his new yacht to Jersey for its maiden voyage, with his Scandinavian girlfriend Gudrun aboard and a party of the island's rich watching from the harbour. That night, a couple falls overboard: the man, Rupert Galliers, drowns; the woman, Emerald, is found on life support. Bergerac suspects murder.

Stratford Johns — the granite-faced veteran of Z-Cars, one of British television's great authority figures — plays Buckley with a weathered, partly deaf menace, a former drummer who has made enough money to buy his way onto the island and bring his hangers-on with him. Marina Sirtis, years before Star Trek: The Next Generation, plays Gudrun with a brittle, cornered quality that makes her more than a decoration. Oliver Horsbrugh directs with a tone that lets the glamour and the death sit together.

Holmes' script is interested in the gap between the public life of a star and the private event on the water. The guard rail is easy to fall over, especially drunk; there was a full moon; the survivor's family arrive with their own suspicions about the new friends their daughter took up with. Bergerac works from the couple's past — a stud farm sold, a stage name adopted — to the truth of what happened on the yacht.

It is a solid, character-driven hour with a strong guest cast and a satisfyingly bleak conclusion. The rock-star setting gives the series a contained world of money and attention, and Johns' performance anchors it. A late-season entry that shows the third series could stage a celebrity murder without strain — and a reminder that Bergerac's best stories were often the ones where the rich could not protect themselves.