Whatever Lola Wants

The sixth series opens with a gem of a guest part: Kate Buffery as Lola Betts, a mother who would sell her own son for half a million pounds' worth of diamonds, and the episode is built entirely around her. The premise is classic Bergerac. Reggie Betts, a small-time thief turned informant, has been sent to Jersey because he hid the diamonds from his last job there — half a million pounds' worth, taken in a safe-breaking that went wrong — and he wants to collect them and flee. His mother Lola is being fetched from the mainland by Bergerac and Willy Pettit, and from the moment she wins five hundred pounds at cards on the ferry and stabs the loser in the hand when he objects, the series knows exactly what it has.

Brian Finch's script, directed by Nigel Finch, is a study in family loyalty as a blood sport. Lola wants the diamonds so she and Reggie's younger brother Tony can sell them; Reggie does not trust her; and the gangster Joey Brown, played with oiled menace by Harry Towb, wants his cut and has sent men to take it. The safe house, the police guard, the tour of Bonne Nuit Bay where Lola photographs everything — the episode is a chess game in which everyone is playing everyone else. Bergerac, distracted by his own crumbling relationship with Susan, is slower than usual, and the script lets him be.

The kidnapping of Lola, her deal with Brown, and the double-cross at the tower outcrop resolve into a family standoff: Lola and Reggie take turns threatening each other with the same gun while Tony makes off with the diamonds in the boat. Bergerac, arriving with the pieces finally in place, arrests them both with a weariness that the episode has earned. Lola's last act is to have led everyone exactly where she wanted them — the only question being which of her children she was betraying.

It is a confident, funny, hard-edged opener that shows the sixth series' willingness to let its villains be more interesting than its heroes. Buffery is magnificent, and the episode never once pretends that motherhood and larceny are incompatible. A strong start to the year, and proof that Bergerac could build an hour around a single, appalling, irresistible character.