- John Nettles Occupation radio drama documentary to be broadcast nationally.
- Re-live the first episode of his hit series Bergerac, set in Jersey below.
- Should Bergerac return? Take part in our poll.
BERGERAC star John Nettles is behind a radio drama-documentary about the Occupation of the Channel Islands which will be broadcast nationally on BBC Radio Four and Five Live next month.
As well as Mr Nettles, the programme features actor Joss Ackland, in the role of Winston Churchill, and fellow Bergerac actors including Jolyon Baker as the Bailiff during the Occupation, Alexander Countanche.
- The actor appeared as Detective Sergeant Jim Bergerac in 87 episodes of Bergerac between 1981 and 1991, and in 81 episodes of Midsomer Murders, as Detective Chief Inspector Tom Barnaby, from 1997 until 2011.
- When he is not working or studying the Second World War, his interests include going to the theatre and opera, and supporting Arsenal football team.
- He has one daughter, Emma, and two grandchildren, Nathan and Sophie.
- He was Jersey’s Mr Battle in 1982, appearing at the Battle of Flowers alongside that year’s Miss Battle, Kay Butel.
- He was made an OBE in the Queens Birthday Honours in 2010.?
- In 2010, before writing Jewels and Jackboots, he presented and produced a three-part documentary, Channel Islands At War.
Liberation 70 is written and presented by Mr Nettles, who also plays key parts, and has been produced by Michael Chequer and Oliver Ings for BBC Radio Jersey.
The programme has its première tomorrow at noon on Radio Jersey and will be repeated by BBC stations in Guernsey and Devon on Sunday.
It will also be broadcast on Radio Four Extra on Liberation Day, 9 May, at 8 am and 3 pm, and at 3 am the following day.
It will be broadcast on Radio Five Live at 7 pm on 17 May.
Recorded in the islands and the UK, the programme draws on local archive material and Islanders’ diaries and personal memoirs to bring to life the main events of the Liberation using a mixture of contemporary and archive recordings.
Mr Chequer said: ‘It has been a privilege to work with John.
‘He has a tremendous passion for the Channel Islands which I think really comes across. He has spent countless hours researching and writing Liberation 70 and has been involved in the production process right up to the final day of editing.’
The programme tells the story of the Occupation through the eyes of Islanders like Eva Bouteloup, who witnessed the German bombing of La Rocque in June 1940.
‘Joss is 87 years old now, so we recorded him in the study of his home in north Devon.’
Mr Nettles has also written a history of the Occupation, entitled Jewells and Jackboots, published in 2012, which was inspired by his television documentary series, The Channel Islands at War, which was first broadcast in 2010
In 2012, the JEP reviewed John Nettles new book, Jewels and Jackboots:
EVER since John Nettles helped bring Jersey into the homes of millions during his stint as DS Jim Bergerac, the Island has held him in great affection.
That fondness is reciprocated and gave him an important feeling for the community which informed the way he approached his work.
However, Mr Nettles, a university history scholar, embarked on his research and the writing of the book with great emphasis on providing an objective account of the Channel Islands Occupation experience.
As a result, Jewels Jackboots paints a very fair picture which does not shy away from some of the more difficult aspects of those five awful years.
In a chapter entitled Precious Little Resistance, the author looks at the lack of armed resistance in the Island.
‘Was there not a small army of men and women ready and willing to lay down their lives in the cause of freedom from the Nazi yoke?’ he asks, before going on to explain that the conditions necessary to allow such a movement, not least a place of refuge where fighters could hide out, were absent in Jersey and the other islands.
Instead, the islands’ leaders presided over a cautious balancing act based on an understanding that they would co-operate if the Germans visited no violence on the civilian population.
Mr Nettles praises the diplomacy of those leaders and the service they did for their islands. The chapter gives many personal accounts of Occupation life and concludes that this was necessary and reasonable co-operation, not collaboration.
Mr Nettles has a special interest in the treatment of the Jews in Jersey and devotes a chapter to the subject.
He concludes that the islands’ authorities governed with little or no regard to the interests of the Jews, whose plight in Europe he says they must have known.
‘They didn’t even try,’ he writes. ‘Indeed the opposite appears to be the case, for by registering anti-Jewish measures in the Royal Courts without demur and by helping to implement those measures, the Jews were actually deprived of any interests or rights of citizenship at all.
The Island government actively helped and connived in a process designed to reduce them to non-persons with no legitimate interests of any kind.’
Jewels and Jackboots combines an authoritative narrative with personal accounts and pictures which bring the story alive. Those pictures often lack captions which would
make the book a more enjoyable thing to read and flick through, and there are points where the author has assumed the reader will know the context and importance of documents without explanation.
There is, however, a very useful timeline at the start of the book which helps the reader quickly place individual incidents within a broader context.
It is a coffee-table style book with academic credibility. Many, many months of research, both interviews with those who lived through the Occupation and through the study of written archive material, have been condensed into a history which is an important addition to the literature on one of the darkest periods of Jersey’s past.
It manages to tell two stories – that of the clash of countries and ideologies alongside that of the experience of ordinary people trying to get on with life amid the tumult.
