Excited Fans Welcome Back Beloved Show on TV After 30+ Years – Find Out if the Original Star is Returning

Think of DS Jim Bergerac and you picture John Nettles looking impossibly cool in his open-top 1940s Triumph Roadster. 

With just his sunglasses for a disguise and the elbow of his jacket casually resting on the driver’s door, he would stake out a villain’s mansion or admire the sunset over the Channel Islands.

Bergerac has undergone significant changes. An eagerly anticipated remake is set to debut this month, featuring Irish actor Damien Molony as the Jersey copper, in a more intense and psychologically driven reimagining.

The six-part series, which launches on the U&Drama channel, puts the emphasis on Bergerac’s mental state. 

Traumatised by the recent death of his wife, he’s drinking heavily and struggling to look after his teenage daughter, never mind hold down his job. 

And when he insists on joining a murder investigation after a woman is found bludgeoned to death, there are plenty who want to see him fail.

Unlike the original, which had a different case each week, this sees one investigation spread across the series. 

The shift in tone is exemplified by the new title sequence, which used to open with a map of the island. While it still does, the map now transforms as a drop of blood is shown falling into water.

The one thing this version can’t change is the car. Bergerac is inextricably linked to his vintage sports car, like so many other great telly ‘tecs, from The Bridge’s Saga Noren in her green Porsche 911S to Starsky and Hutch in that unmistakable red-and-white Ford Gran Torino, or Inspector Morse with his beloved Jaguar Mark II.

What viewers never guessed was that Nettles loathed that Triumph… it constantly broke down.

For the first few seasons of the show, which began in 1981 and continued for 87 episodes over the next decade, he would often stand beside the car or simply sit in it – but he rarely drove. That’s because it had conked out again.

When the Triumph could be coaxed to start, stopping became the problem because its brakes were feeble.

Without power steering, it was as heavy as a lorry too. And the exhaust pumped out clouds of oily black smoke, which ruined numerous shots. Even getting the vehicle into place was a nightmare for the crew, who sometimes had to push or tow it. 

The actor begged the show’s creator, Robert Banks Stewart, to get rid of it – blow it up, perhaps, or drive it over a cliff. But that was out of the question. To many viewers, the car was as much the star as the Jersey setting, or Nettles himself.

Eventually though, the chief props buyer was charged with finding a replacement. Tracking down a 40-year-old Triumph Roadster in the pre-internet era proved a challenge, until one was discovered in the Worcestershire village of Wyre Piddle.

The price was steepish at £2,500 (£7,300 today), but Bergerac was drawing 12 million viewers on Saturday nights so the BBC decided the expense was justified.

The replacement was cream, not ox-blood red, meaning a respray was required. The upholstery was a bigger problem: in the original the interior was grey, but the stand-in had red leather seats.

Look closely at re-runs, currently on streaming service U, and you’ll see the difference.

It’s apt, then, that our first glimpse of the Triumph in the reboot sees the car up on bricks and covered in cobwebs. 

That car is actually the very first one – the production team tracked it down via various owners including a Jersey museum where it had been on display, and restored it to keep it as true to the 80s version as possible. 

Worse, DS Bergerac is passed out drunk in the front, sleeping off the previous night’s bender in his garage.

While Nettles’s Bergerac had been through a difficult divorce and was a recovering alcoholic, mostly winning his battle with the bottle, this reboot is grittier.

Molony plays him as a man desperately trying to stay on the wagon, and failing. His wife has died and he regularly drinks himself into a stupor for the relief of oblivion.

But he knows if he keeps drinking he’ll lose the one person he still has in his life – his teenage daughter Kim (Chloe Sweetlove). She loves him, but in the opening episode moves out, unable to bear living with his self-destructive grief.

It’s this psychological torment that attracted Molony to take the role. ‘I love cop shows,’ he says, ‘but this felt like something different. He isn’t able to look after his daughter. 

He uses the investigation to distract himself from the trauma, and also as a way of convincing his daughter that he can function as a human being. 

He has to prove he’s back on the straight and narrow and hopefully convince his daughter to move back home.’

Deep research went into that drunken scene with the car. ‘I spoke to people about bereavement,’ Molony explains. ‘Specifically, one guy told me there’s a lovely moment where you wake up in the morning, you’ve had a dream about your partner, you open your eyes and, for a split second, everything feels OK. And then you remember.’ 

It turns out, in subsequent episodes, there’s a poignant reason why the detective prefers to sleep in the car rather than his bed.

Born in 1984, Molony is too young to remember the show first time around, though he made a point of watching the first episode before his audition. 

His interpretation is very different from the hard-bitten, cynical but romantic character Nettles portrayed. Molony plays Bergerac as vulnerable, soft-spoken and self-deprecating, wearing his pain in the open.

He does have the same boyish charm, though at 40 he’s actually five years older than Nettles was when the show began in 1981. 

It was created by Banks Stewart, a screenwriter whose previous crime serial Shoestring was one of the BBC’s biggest hits – until its leading actor unexpectedly announced he didn’t want to do it any more.

Trevor Eve played Eddie Shoestring, a shabby private eye in the West Country, whose investigations made him a reluctant media star. 

Hosting a radio show, Eddie invited listeners to call in with their problems, which frequently turned out to be murderous. 

When Eve quit Shoestring after just two seasons, Banks Stewart had a sheaf of storylines already written and, rather than waste them, he persuaded the Beeb to let him make another series. 

Since viewers loved the Somerset backdrop of Shoestring, the writer picked somewhere equally beautiful: Jersey.

It was this decision, as much as the success of Inspector Morse in Oxford, that set the trend for crime series to be tied to a distinctive location, be it Shetland, Edinburgh, Bath or the fictional county of Midsomer (where John Nettles would land after Bergerac). 

‘I didn’t really comprehend how important Jersey was to Bergerac, and Bergerac was to Jersey,’ admits Molony. ‘When we were filming in public places, such as a chase sequence through Royal Square in St Helier, members of the public could come and watch – and in between takes they would come up to me and talk about how happy they were that Bergerac was back.’

Many of them shared their memories of filming in the 80s. So many of the people I met had been an extra on the original, or they had met John in a restaurant, or a taxi driver would say, ‘Let me tell you about the time I had that John Nettles in the back of the cab!’ 

Whether Molony will become as big a Jerseyphile as John is yet to be seen. He not only wrote two books about the island, but his daughter Emma went on to become an officer with the Jersey police.

Not everyone had a fond view of the show, though. In 1989 one of its writers, John Fletcher, launched an attack on the Channel Islands population.

‘I don’t like Jersey,’ he said, ‘with all those rich tax exiles waving their Union Jacks. They’re not patriotic enough to stay and pay their taxes in Britain.’ The Jersey folk hit back.

One local restaurateur said, ‘We are getting to feel that the series portrays life here as a class struggle.’ 

And a judge on the island, Vernon Tomes, said, ‘According to the series, we have drugs rings, brothels and murders all the time. 

But there is hardly any crime at all here. People don’t sit around sipping champagne all day. They are industrious.’

Real-life DCI Martin Le Brocq, interviewed by a BBC news team in 1987, also bristled a little at the image portrayed of his island. 

It made Jersey look, he said, ‘full of fraudsters, high-class criminals and drug runners. 

In fact, the truth is we have a transient population of itinerant criminals and, obviously, an indigenous criminal element as well who are more into house-breaking and petty thieving.’ 

He added mournfully, ‘I wish our detection rate was as successful as Bergerac’s. He always gets his man.’

The locals are unlikely to have any complaints this time. Director Colm McCarthy declares, ‘Jersey is the real star of the show’, and that’s not only because of its picture postcard prettiness.

‘We tried to use the landscape,’ he says, ‘and in particular its unusual relationship to the sea, to help tell the story.

It has one of the longest tides in the world, with incredible beaches that appear and disappear. That’s really interesting to use to reflect Jim’s emotional state.

‘We scheduled a lot of the filming around sunsets and sunrises, to get that low sun over the water that’s such a familiar staple from LA noir movies. We couldn’t have achieved that anywhere else in the UK.’

One major difference from the original is the casting of Bergerac’s father-in-law, Charlie Hungerford, the charmer with a predilection for dodgy business deals.

In the 1980s he was played by Terence Alexander with a roguish twinkle. This time round Charlie is a woman, Bergerac’s mother-in-law, with Zoe Wanamaker in the role.

‘Damien and Zoe had great comedic chemistry,’ says Colm. ‘They’re very funny together, bright and sparky, and that helps viewers form a real emotional connection to Jim Bergerac.’

Wanamaker has her work cut out. For many fans Charlie was the favourite, a sort of silver-haired version of David Jason’s Del Boy or Ian McShane in Lovejoy – mischievous, and generally to be found on the wrong side of the law, but with a heart of gold. 

The role gave a late taste of fame to Terence Alexander, who was 58 when the show began. ‘It’s funny,’ he told the Daily Mail with a chuckle in 1981, ‘I don’t know anyone who’s been discovered as often as I have.’

His version of Charlie was a good pal to Bergerac, even if they disagreed about the ethics of law-breaking. But Wanamaker’s reimagining has the two of them at loggerheads.

She makes no secret of her dislike for her son-in-law: when he asks if she can put him up for the night, she retorts, ‘Yes, I’ll muck out one of the stables.’

Nonetheless, the remake still has its own dodgy businessman, a rough diamond called Arthur – played by Philip Glenister.

‘A bit of a geezer,’ he says, ‘a bit of a lad. I remembered the show from first time round, and I told my agent, ‘I want to play Charlie. Because obviously I’m too old to be Bergerac.’ 

Basically, all Charlie Hungerford used to do was he’d either be on the golf course or at his palatial mansion, sitting by the pool, sipping a chilled glass of something. And every time Bergerac would turn up, he’d go, ‘Not now, Jim, I’m busy!’ And I thought, ‘I could do that.’ 

In fact, Glenister had a bit part in the original’s last ever episode, in 1991. His fondest memory of that, he says, is going for a celebratory meal with the rest of the cast, where Nettles treated everyone to a fish supper.

The big question on every fan’s lips, however, will surely be whether John Nettles, who’s 81 now, will grace the show with a cameo. 

‘I got a lovely letter from them,’ he said recently. ‘They said will you come along and do a little cameo at the end? I thought, ‘No, because that would get in the way of the actual production.’ It would destroy, in some sense, the integrity of the production. In any case, I’m too old and I’ve retired, I’ve got to face up to that.’

Bergerac is available on U and U&Drama from 27 February.