The Memory Man

The fifth series opens with a man standing naked on a cliff edge — and the mystery of who he is, and what he has done, drives the whole hour. "The Memory Man", written by Chris Boucher and directed by Graeme Harper, both veterans of Doctor Who, is a story about a man running from his own memory. The amnesiac, brought to the Bureau, has no name, no labels in his made-to-measure clothes, and a doctor's verdict that his amnesia is genuine but hysterical — he is blocking something out. Crozier, mindful of a tight budget with no overtime, tells Bergerac not to spend too much time on it. The case, of course, will not let him go.

David Swift plays the amnesiac with a gentle, baffled confusion that the episode never cheapens. He is taken in by Hungerford as a house guest — the series' way of keeping the mystery close — and wakes screaming from a nightmare in which he was strangling someone. The hotel key in his pocket leads to a room booked in the name of J Smythe, containing clothes, money and a gun. The fingerprints settle it: he is Bartholomew ffelps-Smythe, wanted by the mainland police for strangling his wife and child and leaving their bodies under a tarpaulin. He has dyed his hair. He is a killer who has forgotten he is one.

The plot, such as it is, involves the man's own friends — Pat Harrison and Richard Lewis, the upper-class pair who have been shepherding him, and who want him smuggled out of the country to escape justice. They are the real villains of the piece: they have lied to him, used him and, when cornered, will see him dead. The confrontation on the ferry, where the confused Smythe tackles Harrison and is accidentally shot, has a grim inevitability: the biggest danger to him, as Belle Young observes at the end, came from his friends.

Belle — played with salty relish as Susan's aunt, a Guernsey smuggler who turns up when she needs money — gives the hour its comic warmth in the margins. The ending is sour and funny at once: Bergerac, Crozier and Belle watch the body taken away, and Bergerac remarks on the unpaid overtime and the lack of a clothing budget. A bleak little fable about memory, guilt and friendship, and a confident start to the fifth year.