On the Rocks

"On the Rocks" is the final series' most contained hour — a story about an old woman, a necklace and the family that wants her money, told as a comedy of French manners with a theft at its centre. Business is slow for Bergerac, so when Charlie is invited to the eightieth birthday of an old friend — Constance Battison, whose husband Georges was French, and who has raised her granddaughter Camilla since the parents died — he accepts the job of chauffeur for £150 a day. The party, naturally, is more eventful than anyone expected: a necklace goes missing, a workman is caught ransacking the house, and the insurance company sends a discreet investigator to ask why.

Christopher Russell's script, directed by Michael Rolfe, is a study in the kindnesses and cruelties of family. Constance, played with a fierce, failing dignity, wears the family necklace on her birthday despite her solicitor's warnings; Camilla, her granddaughter, is engaged to the solicitor but clearly not in love with him; and the necklace — insured for ninety thousand pounds — has been reported stolen by Camilla, who grazed her own head to sell the story. The theft, the episode slowly reveals, was her plan: the insurance money would let her buy a copy and free herself from a marriage she does not want. The vicious nature of the fall, the episode notes, is what gives it away.

The episode is at its best in the quiet scenes between Bergerac and the women. Camilla, caught, is not a villain but a young woman trying to escape the expectations of everyone around her; Constance, who knows more than she says, is the episode's true heart. The resolution is gentle rather than punitive — the money not paid, the truth told, the marriage quietly dissolved — and the series lets the characters walk away with their dignity mostly intact.

It is a modest, well-made hour that shows the final series could do domestic mystery with a light touch. The French setting, the birthday party, the necklace and the family secrets give it a closed, elegant shape, and the series wears its melancholy lightly: this is Bergerac at his most human, helping people rather than catching them. A quiet, satisfying entry, and a reminder that the final year was not all grim.