I’ve only been to Jersey once. The occasion was to interview Alan Whicker, and how well I remember the rolling lanes, the pink house clad in camellias, the man himself in an Hermès tie (dreamy old-school manners). But I felt I knew the island long before I got there. Between 1981 and 1991, millions of us visited it in our imaginations courtesy of Bergerac, whose titular character famously drove a maroon Triumph Roadster.
Oh, but it was glamorous! Jersey: like Weymouth, except you had to fly there. Jim Bergerac (John Nettles) was a police sergeant who wore a conker-coloured leather jacket, had a funny, vulgar, cigar-smoking father-in-law named Charlie Hungerford, and was the king of the fictional Bureau d’Étrangers, which sounds now like a Priti Patel fever dream, but back then was merely a sausage factory that fed the series’ hungry demand for visiting conmen and other criminals.
So what of the Bergerac reboot, free to air on U? Oh dear. I think I knew it was going to be a damp squib; that far from having fun down among the tax exiles and the palm trees, our swimmers would be made of horsehair, and our ice creams dairy free. Still, I’m disappointed. Where are the bougainvillea and fruits de mer?
Bergerac (Damien Molony) is now a grieving widower as well as a recovering alcoholic; Charlie Hungerford (Zoë Wanamaker) is now his mother-in-law, whose repartee with him is devoted mostly to – yawn – school fees (when the series begins, Bergerac’s daughter Kim is living with her); and Barney Crozier (Robert Gilbert), his formerly snake-like colleague, is a charisma-free zone. Even the leather jacket has gone, replaced by something khaki that looks like it might have emanated from St Helier’s Mountain Warehouse. All we have to cling to is the Triumph. By rights, it should be a Tesla, but every detective needs a trademark, and older viewers who stream U (formerly UKTV Play) do love a classic car.
The original Bergerac (also on U) may look comical to 21st-century eyes: all those police Mini Metros spurting into action, like so many dustbins on wheels. But at least it didn’t take itself too seriously. The new Bergerac can’t even crack a smile when Philip “Life on Mars” Glenister appears, playing a man whose daughter – spoiler – was murdered while he was at the opera (the storyline runs across six episodes, which marks another change from times past, when each one was zippily self-contained).
Glenister always plays the same role lately, and here his grumpiness is front and centre, a swinging kipper tie of irascibility that marks him down as both rich and definitely not the kind of guy who weeps at La Traviata. Personally, I perked up immediately at the sight of him: as no one except Mike White, the writer of The White Lotus, seems to understand that in these straitened times we’re all about other people’s bank statements (awe, envy: take your pick). Only then Wakefield, his home a crime scene, checked in to an island hotel. Eh? His room was an attic with an en suite the size of a bath mat. Perched on its only sofa, his “chief of staff”, Margaret Heaton (Pippa Haywood), tried to look nonchalant at the prospect of organising a top-level diary in the presence of so much travel-sized shampoo.
Will Bergerac 2.0 be permitted a private life? The old Jim was a sex symbol who had several girlfriends and an ex-wife with whom he flirted gratuitously (watching him, my mother used to go into a trance state, which was embarrassing for us all). It’s hard to imagine, for all that they’ve made him a widower.
Molony talks very earnestly and quietly, no heat in his words, and no drollery either. The writers have him spouting little cracker-barrel homilies about grief, which would be bad even if he still had the leather jacket; as it is, he exudes a whiffy, grey-green drabness, like bladderwrack on a beach. Oof! C’est dommage. The original theme tune – boing, boing, boing – remains but now has a clubby beat, the accordions that sang of the nearby fleshpots of Cherbourg entirely vanished, and with them what might have made the series a bit different in a world of identikit TV cops.
Bergerac
Available on U
[See also: James Blunt live: a nostalgia karaoke]
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This article appears in the 26 Feb 2025 issue of the New Statesman, Britain in Trump’s World