The Last Interview

The fourth series returns after a near-two-year gap, and Robert Banks Stewart's opener wastes no time announcing that the show has grown up. "The Last Interview" is a Mafia story with a journalist's conscience at its centre. In New York, three members of the mob listen to a tape recording of Tony Aberlini — a dying Mafia boss who wants one last interview with Howard Bailey, the television journalist who is the only person who knows where he is. Bailey, played by George Innes, is on Jersey, rich and reclusive, hiding from the consequences of his own career. Arlene Roskin, a television producer sent to fetch him, is played by Lysette Anthony with a cool, professional surface that takes time to crack.

Bergerac is drawn in sideways. He is busy with a flat-hunt and an estate agent named Susan Young — the beginning of the relationship that would define the next five years of the series — when the island is invaded by the story. The mob's plan, when it emerges, is not to kill Bailey but to use him: the tape of Aberlini is a forgery, the work of an impersonator, and the men who have come to Jersey want Bailey to tell them where the real boss is hiding. They take Bailey and his housekeeper hostage in his secure estate, and Bergerac, working from a bank manager's suspicious silence and a suitcase full of cash, has to get in through a coal cellar while Crozier — now a chief inspector with wider responsibilities — moves in with marksmen.

Shane Rimmer, the Canadian-American actor long based in Britain, plays Joe Conte with a quiet menace that makes the hostage scenes genuinely uncomfortable; Carl Rigg's Percotti is the violence; Gawn Grainger's Marchetta the brains behind the impersonation. Brian Farnham directs with a taut, procedural urgency that suits the series' new, harder register.

The episode's sharpest turn is its darkest: the mob has the full tape of an interview Bailey made with an African dictator, showing him standing by while two European mercenaries were executed — and the death threat he received was from the mother of one of them. Bailey has been hiding from that tape for years. His refusal to reveal Aberlini's location, even under threat of exposure, is the hour's moral core. When Bergerac shoots Conte and the siege ends, Bailey goes back inside and rips up the photograph that started it. A confident, brutal opener that shows the fourth series means business.