When Did You Last See Your Father?

"When Did You Last See Your Father?" is written by Robert Banks Stewart, the series creator, and it is a story about class, resentment and the gap between the Jersey the tourists see and the one the locals live in. A woman, Sylvia Gildred, is found unconscious in her cabin on the ferry — robbed, apparently hit from behind and then striking her head on the sink. Her handbag is gone; she was carrying hundreds of pounds in cash; and the two men who shared her deck, the scrap merchant Tom St. Clements and the Oxford graduate Toby Lemaire, both knew how much money she had. Tom's fingerprints are on her case. Tom, it seems, is the obvious suspect.

Michael Gwynn plays Tom with a simmering, righteous anger that the episode takes seriously. He is a Jersey native doing cash-in-hand work, resentful of the rich — the lawyers, the graduates, the men who inherited what he has had to scrape for. His father, Bergerac learns, killed himself when he went bankrupt. Toby, by contrast, is everything Tom is not: polished, connected, and hiding a loan-shark debt he cannot explain. The evidence against Tom is circumstantial; the evidence against Toby is a matter of opportunity and motive. Bergerac, refusing to charge the man Crozier wants charged, is vindicated the hard way.

The resolution is a nasty piece of social irony. Tom, still raging, tries to frame Toby — the locket found in his office, the graffiti on his own wall, the vandalised car with its message about getting the right man. But the truth is worse than the frame: it was Tom, all along, who attacked Sylvia — not for the money but out of fury at the world she represented. His attempt to bury the crime by pointing at Toby is the last act of a man who has decided the system will never listen to him anyway.

The episode's title carries its theme: fathers and what they leave their sons. Tom's father's suicide; Toby's father's refusal to help him; the bishop who arrives for Sylvia and stands by her bed. Bergerac, in the middle, is the only man who listens to the people no one else hears — and the episode is at its strongest when it lets him. A grim, socially acute hour that shows the creator still understood exactly what his series was about: the island's money, its resentments and the men crushed between them.