Jersey boy
Bergerac star Damien Molony joins writer Toby Whithouse, UKTV head of drama Helen Perry and executive producers Ben Bickerton and Phil Trethowan to tell DQ how they revamped the classic 1980s detective drama and why filming in Jersey was “non-negotiable.”
When Blacklight TV executive producers Ben Bickerton and Phil Trethowan were first offered the chance to update classic 1980s detective drama Bergerac, it wasn’t a difficult decision.
“It was a very short conversation,” Trethowan remembers. “It was just us saying, ‘Yes, definitely.’
“We all know what a crowded market it is, that it’s tough out there, so of course IP helps. You grab good IP where you can, but it’s still got to be good IP and we felt with Bergerac it was a no-brainer. Certainly for people of our age, it’s such a well-loved brand. We just took the opportunity and ran with it.”
Fans of the original Jersey-set BBC series, which ran for nine seasons between 1981 and 1991, will remember John Nettles in the iconic role of Detective Jim Bergerac. Now with The Split and Being Human star Damien Molony in the title role, it has been reimagined for a contemporary audience on UKTV’s streamer U and channel U&Drama.
The six-part series, which debuts on February 27, returns to Jersey where Jim is a broken man, grappling with grief and alcoholism following his wife’s recent death. His mother-in-law, Charlie (Zoë Wanamaker), is concerned Jim isn’t putting his daughter Kim first – and when a woman from a wealthy family is murdered, he must fight through his personal struggles to become the formidable investigator he once was.
Directed by Colm McCarthy (The Bastard Son & The Devil Himself), the show’s cast also features Philip Glenister, Pippa Haywood, Robert Gilbert, Sasha Behar, Timothy Renouf and Celine Arden.
Developing the series, Bickerton and Trethowan knew they would need to make something more contemporary. But they also wanted to ensure their show had the “great lead, that pull of Jersey and really knotty crimes” that they rediscovered watching old episodes.
Partnering with scriptwriter Toby Whithouse (Being Human, The Red King), they particularly saw an opportunity to develop the title character by steering away from the established crime-of-the-week format to tell a serialised story focusing on one case and how the investigation influences, and is impacted by, Jim’s personal life.
“He has his problems in the first series. He’s got a drink problem and he’s divorced,” Bickerton says. “What we felt was there’s not much stigma around divorce anymore, but if he’d lost his wife, it’s a similar field but puts him in a more traumatised emotional space and we could really explore that.
“That was the starting point, and with Toby, to do that justice, to tell a character story, you’ve got to tell a serialised story.”
Trethowan adds: “It gave us the opportunity to delve deeper, and the relationship between alcoholism and grief is much more potent a mix.”
Unravelling a single ‘whodunnit’ over six episodes also offered them the hooks they needed to keep viewers engaged by asking “big dramatic questions people will need to find the answer to,” Bickerton says.
Whithouse describes making Bergerac as a “really happy experience,” though he concedes “it was quite out of my comfort zone.” In fact, when he first began working on the show, he had never done any type of police procedural series. Bergerac and The Red King – a blend of police drama and folk horror also for UKTV – now makes two.
“It’s the first thing I’ve written since No Angels where there’s no high concept to it at all. That was the challenge. Not a single robot, nothing,” he jokes.
Writing a police drama is “ultimately always about a slow reveal of story,” he continues. “I also felt really strongly that part of this reinvention [of Bergerac] should be about doing one story per season, because viewing habits have changed so hugely over the last few years that telling a much more complex, labyrinthine plot just felt more appropriate.”
RELATED CONTENT
DQ100 2024/25 – Part three
In the third part of the DQ100 2024/25, DQ picks out a range of shows to tune in for and the actors, directors and writers making them, as well as some of the trends and trailblazers worth catching up with.
Fit for a King
British actor Anjli Mohindra tells DQ about taking the lead for the first time in folk-horror crime drama The Red King, in which she plays a by-the-book detective who picks up the unsolved case of a missing boy while confronting an island community with a unique cult history.
Cutting Edge drama
Executive producers Phil Trethowan and Ben Bickerton tell DQ about curating Channel 4’s anthology series On the Edge, while writer Nessah Muthy reveals how true events inspired her episode about a new mother struggling with her mental health.
The writer isn’t a stranger to dealing with major IP, however, having previously written episodes of Doctor Who. He also had to reboot his own supernatural series Being Human when the main cast exited the show (a move that saw Molony join in season four).
“There’s always a nervousness about anything that has any history or legacy,” he says. “If you think about it too much, it’s very easy to become overwhelmed by it. So in the nicest possible way, you have to ignore all of that and create something that is its own beast.
“It’s that old saying of, ‘You should never give an audience the show they want, you give them the show they need.’ With this, we had to free ourselves. You almost have to think, ‘Not everyone’s going to love this.’ But that’s the only way for it to be a pure piece. Otherwise you end up with a mess that satisfies and pleases absolutely no one.”
Setting the series in Jersey again was “non-negotiable,” Whithouse says. But rather than starting work by piecing together a murder case, he began by thinking about Jim Bergerac himself.
“I always do a lot of character work before I even think about plot, because I tend to find that the plot will spin itself out of the character,” he says. “The more you understand the character, the more you understand about the scenarios and the predicaments you’re going to put them in that challenge them.”
He then considered how to deal with Jim’s alcoholism, which through the series transforms into a work addiction as his sense of self-worth becomes linked to his progress on the case. “Over the course of the series, we start to unpick that, so all these thoughts came up about the character, and that was the thing I engaged with,” he says. “All of the first meetings we had, when we were developing it, were about character. We’d done a lot of this groundwork before we started thinking about the murder.”
Bergerac was one of the projects “in the mix” when Helen Perry joined UKTV as its new head of drama just over a year ago, and she greenlit the series when just two scripts were written. “It was just really exciting because I love Toby. He’s such a fantastic writer, and it was a joy working with him,” she says.
But while remaking the original series might have been a “no-brainer” for the producers, for Perry, there was as much risk with this project as commissioning an original idea.
“The truth is, I was really nervous about it,” she admits. “When you take something that is so beloved by so many people, you run the risk of disappointing people who have really high expectations – or even worse, do we feel irrelevant to those people who don’t even know the original and they’re like, ‘Well, why should I come to this thing that means nothing to me?’ It felt like a really risky proposition.”
As well as the serialised approach to the series and gender-swapping the character of Charlie, one point Perry discussed with the creative team was how complex the crime story should be.
“I just think now audiences are so sophisticated and they’ve watched so much telly, they can predict who’s done it mile off if you’re not careful, so a lot of the thought after those two scripts were delivered was rethinking, re-plotting and moving forwards with the complexity of the crime story,” she says. “But also just in terms of the gender politics and who Jim is, the relationships with women, the characterisation of women in the show, it was about making sure the show is bang up to date and didn’t slide into anything that felt remotely dusty when it came to gender politics and portrayal.”
The exec praises McCarthy for bringing “heat” to the series – “and it’s also a little bit sexy,” meaning it doesn’t look like daytime TV nor cosy crime. “It’s not quite menacing, but it adds something to the intensity of the crime story. And what Damien has brought to it is a youthful energy,” she says. “He does this thing sometimes where he doesn’t say anything. He just acts with his eyes in such a way. It’s brilliant.”
In addition to having previously worked with Whithouse on Being Human, Molony had partnered with Blacklight TV on a Channel 4 short called Cradled. “So I knew I was in safe hands,” he says about landing the lead role.
When he was sent the scripts, he found that although it is a detective series, Bergerac is actually about a heartbroken dad who’s not able to look after his daughter. He subsequently gets involved in the police investigation to provide a distraction from his troubled home life and prove to his daughter that he’s able to sort his life out.
“That’s what got me really excited about it,” he says. “Then, once word got out that I was playing Bergerac, people were so happy for me to get to play this wonderful role. But also, it evokes this incredible nostalgia and it’s just a very happy memory for so many people, none more so than in Jersey.”
The actor also watched episodes of the original series to get a sense of the show – he even met Nettles for lunch – but didn’t want to copy or recreate anything about Nettles’ performance as the title character. Instead, he researched bereavement and spoke to people who had experienced both alcoholism and being left behind after losing a loved one, just as Jim has.
“Why I love that Toby brought that element [of grief] into our version was that it totally justifies why he became an alcoholic,” Molony says. “And it totally justifies the relationship with his daughter. So it is a cop show, but really at the heart of it is a family unit that has lost its central piece and they can’t quite bring it back together.”
Of course, Bergerac wouldn’t be Bergerac without Jersey, and Bickerton and Trethowan visited the Channel Island even before Whithouse boarded the project, securing backing for the new series from Visit Jersey. Even now, the original Bergerac remains part of the island’s heritage, and the producers were immediately taken by it on their visit.
“It feels very British, but it also feels quite Mediterranean because it’s got its own microclimate,” Bickerton notes. “It’s very beautiful. That’s what we were so struck by, just how beautiful it is. So it’s a key part of the IP and it has this mystique for people. Although it’s a character-based, emotional show and has a darkness, it also has blue skies and beautiful beaches.”
“It’s something we wanted to deliver on,” Trethowan adds. “Part of the attraction is you’re going to a beautiful location and escaping into that while also escaping into the story. It’s key to it. We knew we had to deliver that from a filmic perspective. It wasn’t good enough to shoot it as a mere backdrop.”
Filming took place across 16 weeks, with most of the exteriors shot on location while others and many interiors were actually filmed in Devon. “It was a challenge shooting in Jersey because although they did Bergerac, it was a long time ago and there isn’t any filming infrastructure there,” Bickerton explains. “It was a learning curve for all of us, but people were just so wanting to help. We would go to locations and say, ‘We’d love to use this.’ And they would say, ‘So how much do I have to pay for you to come?’ ‘No, we’re paying you.’ There was so much goodwill, which was great.”
On one occasion, a callout for supporting artists was placed to help film a chase sequence through Royal Square in St Helier and into an indoor market – and more than 1,000 people turned up. “So it was an exciting thing for the residents,” Bickerton says. “We spent quite a lot of money there and also took on a quite a lot of trainees and did work experience. We wanted it to be a really positive experience for them.”
On set, Molony’s role called for lots of running, which proved particularly tricky in “slippery” office shoes, plus several fights. But his enduring memory is “lots of beautiful locations.”
“We actually started our Jersey shoot at three in the morning in Bouley Bay, which is this beautiful, quaint harbour in the north of the island,” the actor recalls. “We had to shoot the ‘sunset’ there, but then an hour later before lunch, we’re over on the other side of the island on this vast, windswept beach in St Ouen’s. Logistically, in any other location, that just wouldn’t be possible. But because Jersey is compact and it’s contained, there were so many different and beautiful settings that that we could shoot in, and we shot all over the island.”
With the new-look Bergerac – which is completed by a revamp of the original theme tune – Bickerton promises “a really compelling story with a great character at the heart of it.” He also describes it as an “escapist treat.” Distributor Banijay Rights has already sold the show to ABC in Australia, NPO in the Netherlands, Belgium’s VRT, Sweden’s SVT, Finland’s YLE, Norway’s NRK, Denmark’s DR, BBC First in Poland and New Zealand’s TVNZ.
“It’s this knotty crime drama, it’s poignant and quite a potent character story. And it is in this very beautiful cinematic world,” Bickerton says.
Trethowan adds: “It has a warmth to it and it has a welcoming quality to it, in no small part thanks to Damien and the location. But I still think it’s got substance to it. It takes its themes seriously. So there is still grit in it. Hopefully the main takeout will be a warm feeling of wanting to know what happens next.”
tagged in: Banijay Rights, Ben Bickerton, Bergerac, Damien Molony, Helen Perry, Phil Trethowan, Toby Whithouse, U, U&Drama, UKTV