THERE will be no return for the original TV detective Jim Bergerac in the programme’s revival – irrespective of its success – actor John Nettles has confirmed.
The man who played Bergerac in the BBC television series said he had turned down an approach from the producer of the new series – to be aired next year on U and U&DRAMA – offering him a cameo role.
“I’m 82 now and, despite an inborn thespian narcissism, I cannot in all conscience see myself getting myself out of bed to do that. It’s part and parcel of my past and I have very lovely memories of it now. They were some of the happiest times of my life and I don’t see any way of reviving that in a new format. No way, no way,” he said.
But Mr Nettles said he wished the new series well and described the leading actors in the 2024 cast as “wonderful”.
“I cannot but hope that it is a success and it does everything it says it’s going to do for the Island – it deserves it,” he added.
Describing the original series as capturing the zeitgeist, he said that the whole atmosphere of the 1980s has “disappeared into the mists of time”.
“It was a time of lightheartedness, terrible fashion, even worse music and all the rest of those things. And very much of its time because there were six nightclubs in Jersey at the time – Caesar’s Palace and all the rest of those places down there. The Blessed Isle was very much a place of delight and money. It was so much of its time and things have changed enormously over the years, and policemen don’t behave like that ever now,” he said.
The latest approach inviting him to consider a return to the fictional Jersey is not the first for the actor, who went on to star in Midsomer Murders. An earlier script had Jim Bergerac’s daughter Kim returning to her native island as a senior detective from the Metropolitan Police and helping her father – by now living in a caravan at the end of St Ouen’s Bay – to help with the Island’s mysteriously burgeoning crime rate.
“I was up for a cameo role there. I thought I don’t have to walk very far and I don’t have to fight anybody as I did perpetually in Bergerac when they had very large stuntmen. I remember once in Alderney I had a fight scene with a baddie played by a huge stuntman called Denny who had fought Henry Cooper in his time but nonetheless Bergerac, with one blow, hit Denny, who somersaulted off the back of the pier into Alderney Harbour,” he recalled.
But in spite of the fact that Mr Nettles will not be appearing in the new series, he said he was heartened by its casting, which includes his “favourite actress” Zoë Wanamaker, Philip Glenister and the man who will recreate his own role, Damien Molony.
“I have a suspicion that the young man playing Bergerac is a much better actor than I am, but don’t tell anybody that,” Mr Nettles said.
