S.P.A.R.T.A.

"S.P.A.R.T.A." puts Philippa Vale in an unfamiliar position: she needs Bergerac's help. The episode opens in Spain, where the jewel thief — relaxing by a pool, fending off admirers — finds her hotel room searched by a man claiming to be a Scotland Yard inspector. When he mentions a book, she knows he is lying, knocks him out with a bible and leaves him tied to the bed. The photo in his wallet is damning: a man in paramilitary uniform, paid by Leonidas Enterprises in Jersey — and the uniform is that of S.P.A.R.T.A., an ultra-right-wing group linked to bombings and an assassination. The man, it turns out, is Miles Pynsent, and he wants a notebook that Philippa does not have.

Joanna Lumley is at her most feline here, and the episode gives her a full run of tricks: breaking into the Leonidas office to steal a file, distracting a minder by bathing on the beach below him, and persuading Sir Clive Hamer's young wife Christine to reveal where she hid the notebook — down the side of a chair, after she discovered the robbery. Rod Beacham's script, directed by Robert Young, keeps the pair of them — thief and detective, sworn enemies and uneasy allies — in constant, crackling motion. Bergerac, who wants to arrest her, instead finds himself protecting her, because a cell would be the one place she could be killed.

The threat is a proper thriller. Hamer, the industrialist with a fort on the island of Chausey, runs Leonidas with Pynsent; the notebook contains evidence against him and several influential men. He offers to buy it, tries to have Philippa killed anyway, and ends the episode in a gun battle on his own wharf as the French coastguard closes in. Bergerac, Philippa and the notebook make it out; Hamer and Pynsent do not.

The closing gag is the series at its best: Bergerac, travelling back to Jersey with Hungerford and Peggy, notices a disguised Philippa making her escape in a police launch — because they are not in his jurisdiction, she points out, and a proper extradition would take forever. She is a thief, a liar and a survivor, and the fifth series is richer for every minute she is in it. A stylish, funny, breakneck hour that shows Bergerac's best duels were with the criminals he liked.