The Company You Keep

"The Company You Keep" puts a friend of Charlie Hungerford's under suspicion, and the episode is a clear example of the series' favourite device: Bergerac investigating the people his friend surrounds himself with. A pair of London thieves have begun a crime spree in Jersey, and the burglaries are too well-informed — every target is a house with valuables, emptied exactly when the owners will be away. Someone is tipping them off, and the suspicion falls on one of Charlie's associates.

The guest cast is a gift to the series: Patrick Troughton, the Second Doctor himself, and Bill Owen — the beloved Compo of Last of the Summer Wine — both appear in Charlie's circle, and their presence gives the episode a weight of recognisable British television faces that the smaller stories lacked. Tony Hoare's script, directed by David Reynolds, keeps the burglaries as the spine and the friendship as the hinge: Bergerac must decide how far loyalty extends when a friend's acquaintance is implicated.

The episode is a contained domestic-crime story, built around the thefts and the question of who informed the thieves. The London connection gives it a small outside thread, but the focus stays on Jersey and on Charlie's world — the dinner parties, the house guests, the widening gap between the man Charlie thinks he is and the company he actually keeps. Terence Alexander plays the strain of the suspicion without losing the character's essential bluster.

It is a competent, quietly tense hour rather than a landmark. It shows the series could build a story from a run of burglaries and a friend's bad judgement, and the two great guest stars make it memorable. A solid entry that fits the third series' habit of testing Bergerac's loyalty to Charlie — and a reminder that in Bergerac's Jersey, the company you keep was always the most dangerous thing about you.