I’ve solely been to Jersey as soon as. The event was to interview Alan Whicker, and the way effectively I keep in mind the rolling lanes, the pink home clad in camellias, the person himself in an Hermès tie (dreamy old-school manners). However I felt I knew the island lengthy earlier than I bought there. Between 1981 and 1991, tens of millions of us visited it in our imaginations courtesy of Bergerac, whose titular character famously drove a maroon Triumph Roadster.
Oh, however it was glamorous! Jersey: like Weymouth, besides you needed to fly there. Jim Bergerac (John Nettles) was a police sergeant who wore a conker-coloured leather-based jacket, had a humorous, 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, however again then was merely a sausage manufacturing facility that fed the collection’ hungry demand for visiting conmen and different criminals.
So what of the Bergerac reboot, free to air on U? Oh pricey. I believe I knew it was going to be a moist squib; that removed from having enjoyable down among the many tax exiles and the palm timber, our swimmers could be made from horsehair, and our ice lotions dairy free. Nonetheless, I’m disenchanted. The place are the bougainvillea and fruits de mer?
Bergerac (Damien Molony) is now a grieving widower in addition to a recovering alcoholic; Charlie Hungerford (Zoë Wanamaker) is now his mother-in-law, whose repartee with him is devoted principally to – yawn – faculty charges (when the collection begins, Bergerac’s daughter Kim resides together with her); and Barney Crozier (Robert Gilbert), his previously snake-like colleague, is a charisma-free zone. Even the leather-based jacket has gone, changed by one thing khaki that appears prefer it may need emanated from St Helier’s Mountain Warehouse. All we’ve to cling to is the Triumph. By rights, it needs to be a Tesla, however each detective wants a trademark, and older viewers who stream U (previously UKTV Play) do love a basic automotive.
The unique Bergerac (additionally on U) could look comical to Twenty first-century eyes: all these police Mini Metros spurting into motion, like so many dustbins on wheels. However at the very least it didn’t take itself too critically. The brand new Bergerac can’t even crack a smile when Philip “Life on Mars” Glenister seems, enjoying a person whose daughter – spoiler – was murdered whereas he was on the opera (the storyline runs throughout six episodes, which marks one other change from instances previous, when every one was zippily self-contained).
Glenister at all times performs the identical position recently, and right here his grumpiness is entrance and centre, a swinging kipper tie of irascibility that marks him down as each wealthy and positively not the type of man who weeps at La Traviata. Personally, I perked up instantly on the sight of him: as nobody besides Mike White, the author of The White Lotus, appears to know that in these straitened instances we’re all about different folks’s financial institution statements (awe, envy: take your choose). Solely then Wakefield, his dwelling against the law scene, checked in to an island lodge. Eh? His room was an attic with an en suite the scale of a shower mat. Perched on its solely couch, his “chief of employees”, Margaret Heaton (Pippa Haywood), tried to look nonchalant on the prospect of organising a top-level diary within the presence of a lot travel-sized shampoo.
Will Bergerac 2.0 be permitted a non-public life? The previous Jim was a intercourse image who had a number of girlfriends and an ex-wife with whom he flirted gratuitously (watching him, my mom used to enter a trance state, which was embarrassing for us all). It’s exhausting to think about, for all that they’ve made him a widower.
Molony talks very earnestly and quietly, no warmth in his phrases, and no drollery both. The writers have him spouting little cracker-barrel homilies about grief, which might be unhealthy even when he nonetheless had the leather-based jacket; as it’s, he exudes a whiffy, grey-green drabness, like bladderwrack on a seaside. Oof! C’est dommage. The unique theme tune – boing, boing, boing – stays however now has a clubby beat, the accordions that sang of the close by fleshpots of Cherbourg completely vanished, and with them what may need made the collection a bit totally different in a world of identikit TV cops.
Bergerac
Accessible on U
[See also: James Blunt live: a nostalgia karaoke]