A year before I abandoned my fledgling career in banking (1981) Australian Network 7, in conjunction with the British Broadcasting Company (BBC), brought a character, created by Scotsman Robert Banks Stewart, to life, in the form of a dodgy knee’d recovering alcoholic, Detective Sergeant Jim BERGERAC, of the States of Jersey Police’s Bureau des Étrangers. This department was fictional but in the series, was responsible for dealing with dodgy ‘foreigners’ in the island and those that had moved to live in Jersey from other jurisdictions, primarily due to their wealth and connections, and often underhanded behaviour. The original character of Jim Bergerac was cast, with St. Austell born John Nettles in the signature role. It was believed that rather than John attempt a Jersey accent, which would be strange for the watching public outside of the island to understand, Nettles settled on a soft south-west country mid-range brogue as he was introduced to television audiences regularly on weekend evenings on the BBC.
(Photograph: BBC / John Nettles AKA Jim Bergerac, in his iconic Triumph Roadster)
In October 1981, the first series announced itself to its BBC audience and ran for ten episodes charting Detective Sergeant Jim as he negotiated recovery from alcoholism, a prickly ex-wife, Deborah, a raft of miscreants, characters and murderers, a rich and slightly dodgy Yorkshire ex-Father-in-Law, Charlie Hungerford (played by Terry Alexander), and an Inspector, Barney Crozier (Sean Arnold), who was always on Jim’s back for one reason or another. Jersey audiences often, on first showing, considered the plot secondary to many of the Director’s ‘poetic licence’ decisions that may have made for good television, but had local viewers scratching their heads, as they saw cars driving the wrong way along Broad Street, or vehicles entering a town centre Napoleonic fort’s tunnel entrance and emerging on the other side of the island (St. Aubin). However, I am sure that viewers, local to other detective series’s in other locations, must have experienced similar confusion, such as Morse in Oxford, Rebus in Edinburgh and Scott and Bailey in Manchester. It is never quite what it seems in television land.
Anyway, where do I come in ? During that first autumn showing of Bergerac Series 1, I was becoming disillusioned with the world of finance and realised that being cooped up in an office for the rest of my working life was not where I envisioned myself staying for the next fifty years. I was not a cage animal; I wanted to roam free. Clichéd though it may sound, I wanted to serve my community and what better way than to become a police officer. I started the process to join the States of Jersey Police Force in the June of 1982 and on 1st October of that year, I entered the Rouge Bouillon Police Headquarters, in a shiny new uniform and the service number 30. A week later I was on my way to Ashford Police Training Centre in Kent for my ten week introduction to the world of policing, accompanied by Pc Keith Bray.
There was no Bergerac series broadcast in 1982, but Jersey officers often got their leg pulled using Bergerac as a means to make fun of us along with the mistaken belief that we had just crawled out of the primordial swamp, with such comments as “Does your police national computer run on gas?”, “Do you have tractors for police cars?” and “It must be quiet if Bergerac solves all your cases.” Actually, in 1982, the States of Jersey Police always did personal background checks through the UK PNC (Police National Computer) and manual card index searches for previous local convictions and Honorary Police Parish Hall enquiries* for local villains. Our own police computer wasn’t set up until the mid 1980’s and we all, as officers, were responsible for populating the system, which started with zero information.
*Honorary Police Parish Hall Enquiries – The island of Jersey is a 9 x 5 mile island, twelve miles east of the French Norman coast and 100 miles south of the United Kingdom. In that small area of land we have THIRTEEN POLICE FORCES. The professional Police Force in Jersey, in its present form, is relatively young, created in 1952, and the twelve Parish Police forces have recordings of their activities dating back to the 15th century, based on a Norman French system of Cénteniers (officers in charge of a hundred households) and under them, Vingteniers (each responsible for twenty of those 100 houses). The overall Head of the Honorary Police force, up until recently, was the Connétable of the Parish (similar to the Mayor of a town). Parish Hall Enquiries were a means of dealing with less serious offences by way of a number of remedies, such as a verbal or written warnings, and/or a number of fines for offences that did not warrant a trip to the Magistrate’s Court or, as it was formerly known, the Police Court.
Having passed out as a qualified police officer at Ashford Police Training Centre on 18th December 1982 (Ashford was covered in snow) , having absorbed weeks of English law, we returned home to a three- week course on Jersey Law.
The second Bergerac series was due to start filming in 1982 (broadcast in 1983) and I realised that real serving police officers were being used by the BBC crew as both extras and traffic and crowd control during our days off. Before the end of a week’s shift pattern, in the run up to our days off, the Duty Sergeant would have the Bergerac requirements for the next couple of days and volunteers were sought. The days were often long, sometimes boring, and extremely exciting when called upon to act like real police officers on film – HANG ON – we WERE REAL POLICE OFFICERS.
As Bergerac was coming to an end in the late 80s and finally in 1991 (although most of the ’91 series was set in France), many local police officers were ducking out of Bergerac filming duties, as regular time off to just relax with their families were becoming few and far between. The money was good, but some just wanted a quiet time to themselves, which gave others the chance to rack up more of the BBC licence holders cash. I swear that a large chunk of my house deposit emanated from sharing time with Bergerac, Crozier, Hungerford and the delightful jewel thief Philippa Vale aka Lisa Goddard, who was a reoccurring character. (pictured below: credit – BBC)
I would like to introduce you to the first couple of little stories that I recall from my time working on the original Bergerac series’. Firstly;
HOW I NEARLY KILLED AN EXTRA !!!
(Windward House – St. Brelade’s – former fictional home of Charlie Hungerford – Bergerac – credit: Ian Wylie Photo)
The above picture was Windward House (no longer standing), one of the fictional houses belonging to Charlie Hungerford, Bergerac’s ex-Father-in-Law. The episode found Charlie discovering a dead body in the lounge of his house, in the early hours of the morning. As the filming was on a hot summer day, the film crew had blacked out all of the house’s windows to simulate night time, however my presence was required to accompany the body, and ambulance men, in daylight, from the house to the back of the ambulance, whereupon I was required to climb in with the ‘body’ and the doors of the vehicle were shut before the scene ended. The first time that we shot the scene, the body bag contained a light weight dummy, which looked a little inauthentic as the ambulance men didn’t appear to be carrying any weight and there was no effort in carrying a hollow dummy, so, the Director decided that the person playing the corpse should also be zipped into the body bag and carried. I wasn’t party to that particular conversation so I am unaware as to how agreeable the ‘corpse’ actually was to the decision to zip him into a strong plastic bag in 28 degree heat. My job had now changed to the uniformed police officer walking alongside the body on a stretcher, climbing into the ambulance with the body, having the doors closed on me and ‘him’ and I then had to quickly unzip the body bag to allow the person to breathe. This scene took ten takes, from various angles, but each time, I unzipped the bag for the corpse. After each take, the person in the bag was sweating more and more profusely as I pulled down the zip. By the end of the tenth take, I was relieved to hear the Director satisfied with the scene and heard, “cut, let’s break there,” which was a relief, as I was dying for a wee and leapt out of the back of the ambulance to find the loo. A few minutes later, I had a thought. Had I or had I not unzipped the body bag before I went to ‘spend a penny?’ Sh*t!!! Don’t think that I did. I ran back to the ambulance, flung open the doors and could see a hand and half an arm sticking out of the bag as the extra was struggling with the zip. I grabbed the zip and pulled it free, much to the relief of a very nearly dead ‘corpse’. Profuse apologies and a few swear words, that I hadn’t heard before, filled the air but, no major harm was done. I wonder now whether certain gyms that promote the use of plastic garments to aid the weight loss of gym users, may have been given the idea from a certain someone in Jersey sweating in the back of an ambulance while filming Bergerac?
PROTECTING LISA GODDARD FROM THE TABLOID PRESS
In 1987, I was seconded to the Sub-Police station for nine months, situated at the side of the St. Brelade’s Parish Hall at St. Aubin’s (picture below). We covered just the Parish of St. Brelade and worked two shift times; 10am – 6pm and 6pm – 2am. Day shifts were often single crewed while the nights required pairing with another officer. There was a civilian who manned the telephones during the day and a Duty Sergeant, who, during my secondment, was Sergeant Terry McDonald, a seasoned veteran officer and excellent supervisor.
(Above – St. Brelade’s Parish Hall in St. Aubin’s)
On this particular day, we had word that the tabloid press were seeking to confirm an unsubstantiated story about John Nettles and Lisa Goddard, and the usual suspects, The Sun, Mirror, News of the World etc. had sent photographers to try and ‘snap’ John and Lisa ‘together’. John was staying away from his rented home in St. Brelade’s Bay while his house guest, Lisa, was staying during filming. Outside was her less than unobtrusive gold coloured jeep with the personalised number plate ‘LG1’. We had been asked to attend to ‘advise’ the photographers that it would be in their interest to ‘cease and desist’ and get down from the branches of the trees nearby and to stop harassing said occupants of the house. I believe that John had spoken to the Sergeant just prior to our visit.
Those that remember the times that jewel thief Philippa Vale (Lisa Goddard) appeared in episodes of Bergerac may remember that, as their on screen ‘relationship’ , such as it was, developed into a strange sort of adversarial friendship with deliberate romantic sparks obliquely hinting of a will they-won’t they situation as characters, Philippa’s opening greeting to Bergerac was often, “Hello Sergeant Darling.” Well, I have to admit that when we knocked on the front door and Lisa answered it, and saw the Sergeant stripes on Terry McDonald’s arm, her actual greeting was identical to ‘Philippa’ greeting Bergerac, as she uttered the immortal words, “Hello Sergeant darling”, to which my professional countenance disappeared as I let out an audible guffaw.
We stayed to reassure her that we would help where we could and the photographers were extracted from the foliage and moved to the roadside and away from danger and from the cottage. Lisa was due to drive to town, late afternoon, to sail on the ferry that evening. Just before we left, our colleague, Duncan Milburn arrived; a seasoned officer, originally from Dumfries, and at times extremely difficult to understand, due to his strong Scottish vocal delivery. The sergeant and I left and accompanied Lisa away from the cottage and the rabid pack of newshounds, while we jokingly left Duncan to give a ‘quote to the press’. Suffice to say, while we made ours and Miss Goddard’s escape, Duncan was spoken to by the photographers, who no doubt couldn’t fathom what the hell he was jabbering on about. The story they were after, didn’t ever make it to press. Lisa Goddard was a charming lady who sounded as posh off screen as her character sounded on it.
(Credit: The series is produced in collaboration with Banijay UK, BlackLight TV, and Jersey-based Westward Studios, with support from Visit Jersey. Damien Molony is pictured front and centre)
Thirty-three years after John Nettles stepped away from Bergerac’s iconic red Triumph Roadster, collaboration and a lot of perseverance between Banjay UK, Blacklight TV and Executive Producer of Westward Studios’s, Brian Constantine, resulted in the creation of a modern take on the iconic Bergerac character, with the first six part continual storyline, filmed in the summer of 2024, airing earlier this year with Bergerac’s character played by Irish actor Damien Molony from County Kildare.
Molony is also known for “roles that include Hal Yorke in BBC Three’s Being Human, DC Albert Flight in the BBC’s Ripper Street, DS Jack Weston in Channel 5’s Suspects, Jon in Channel 4’s GameFace and Dylan in Sky One Original comedy Brassic.” (Wikipedia).
Other well-known actors who joined Damien in the first of the modern Bergerac series, are Zoë Wanamaker (as a female Charlie Hungerford, still Bergerac’s in-law) and one of the villains of the story, Philip Glenister, as Arthur Wakefield.
My involvement in the new Bergerac series is very much behind, and not in front of the screen, employed by a local security company, to provide the cast and crew with security and support wherever needed. It is also a wonderful opportunity for Jersey to be placed front and centre once more with this reimagining of an iconic 80’s show. As a person now in her 60s and not her 20s (as with the original show), I have slowed down a little but am no less enthusiastic about giving my all to the role that I find myself in.
The Jersey shoots are sets of approximately fifteen continuous and intense days, working long hours, alongside some of the nicest and most dedicated professionals in the industry. There is also an increasing number of local Jersey staff, training and working alongside the Bergerac crews, providing them with hands on experience that will stand them in good stead, should they continue in this industry and I, for one, wish them the very best for the future.
There are more stories to come from my forty-two year Bergerac connection.
Urban Warrior Princess 