Private Fight

The sixth series closes with "Private Fight", an episode that puts Bergerac's career on the line and, at the last minute, hands him back his private life. The trouble starts with Hungerford: a man from his past, Peter Retford, has arrived on the island and is shaking down the people who once covered up his dodgy dealings — including Hungerford himself. Retford, an accountant jailed for his part in a corruption scandal, has a list, and he is working through it. One of his targets, the dying James De Courcy, pays up and leaves for Switzerland; another, Harry Johnson, is an old associate of Hungerford's. When Bergerac's car is nearly run off the road and a retired boxer who helped Retford's men is beaten, the connection to Hungerford becomes impossible to ignore.

Edmund Ward's script, directed by Alan Dossor, is a story about loyalty and its price. Bergerac, warned off the case and ordered to protect the very people involved, refuses; when he is drugged — cannabis-laced chocolates delivered to the hospital — and goes on a drunken rampage, Crozier has no choice but to relieve him of duty. The episode lets its hero fall apart in public, and Nettles plays the breakdown with a ragged, self-destructive fury that the series rarely allowed him. The fight is private in the deepest sense: Hungerford's debt is Bergerac's problem, and neither man can walk away.

The resolution is satisfyingly neat. Hungerford and Johnson agree to give evidence anonymously; the money is marked; and the trap closes on Retford — caught with the marked notes and the drug traces, his men identified by the boxer he had beaten. John Forgeham plays Retford with a cold, professional patience that makes the arrest a genuine relief.

The final scene is the series at its most tender. Hungerford explains to Susan that Bergerac was caught up in a private fight; she finds him waiting in his bed; and when Crozier calls, Bergerac unplugs the phone. The sixth series ends not on a case but on a truce — the detective, off duty, with the woman who has spent the season pulling away from him. A strong, human close to a year that had tested its hero hard, and a reminder that Bergerac's hardest cases were always the ones he could not leave at the office.