Bergerac (U&Drama)
Basil! You don’t expect such things at Fawlty Towers — Prunella Scales, aka Sybil the dragon lady of Torquay, with a bag of cocaine in her lap.
This deliciously shocking moment is one of many to savour in the classic crime serial Bergerac, with all episodes available to watch for free on the U streaming service.
Bergerac was one of the first detective dramas to lure top actors into one-off roles each week. A long list includes Greta Scaachi, Michael Gambon, Bill Nighy and Norman Wisdom.
But none were better than Prunella, a superb stage actress who was criminally underused on television. Early in the first season, she donned a blonde bubble-perm wig and blue eyeshadow to play the drunken mother of a pickpocket who steals a consignment of drugs by mistake.
She’s wonderful, especially in a scene where she knocks back a tumbler of whisky as she flirts ravenously with John Nettles, as DS Jim Bergerac.
That was 1981, and it’s alarming to realise that Damien Molony, who plays Bergerac as the Channel Islands detective series is rebooted, wasn’t even born when the original show began.
Molony is 41 and seems to have been around forever, starring in shows from the Victorian crime slasher Ripper Street to Phoebe Waller-Bridge’s pre-Fleabag comedy Crashing.
But he admitted to the Mail’s Weekend magazine that he hadn’t seen the original, until he watched the first-ever episode before his audition. ‘To my shame,’ he said, ‘I hadn’t realised how important Bergerac was to Jersey.’
Bergerac was one of the first detective dramas to lure top actors into one-off roles each week
All episodes of the classic crime serial Bergerac are available to watch for free on the U streaming service
The Channel Islands detective series has been rebooted
This six-part remake is a very different production from the one that enthralled audiences in the Eighties. When writer Robert Banks Stewart first conceived the character, Bergerac was a maverick with a drinking problem in his past, trying to stay on the rails.
But in the new version, he’s a train wreck, on indefinite leave from his job following the death of his wife. His mother-in-law believes he isn’t fit to bring up his beloved daughter, Kim.
And he’s drinking constantly from a hip flask, winding up so sozzled every night that he sleeps in his car — that iconic 1947 Triumph Roadster, now up on bricks in his garage.
Zoe Wanamaker takes over the role of Charlie Hungerford, Jim’s shifty friend and former father-in-law, originally played by Terence Alexander. Charlie makes no secret of her contempt 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.’
In the final episode of the Nettles Bergerac, filmed in 1991, a young Philip Glenister had a bit part. Here he’s a businessman called Arthur, suspected of murder — though he’d hoped to play Charlie himself.
‘Basically, all Charlie Hungerford used to do,’ he says, ‘was sit by the pool at his palatial mansion, 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.’
Couldn’t we all?
