With the good looks and dash of his signature 1947 Triumph Roadster, the Jersey detective is back for a second season in his new incarnation: the polar opposite, seemingly, of his colleagues in Shetland.
Yet Damien Molony’s Jim Bergerac has as many rain clouds over his head in sunny St Helier as Dougie Henshall’s melancholy Jimmy Perez in windy Lerwick, another single father with a demanding job and a teenage daughter to raise. Not the least of Bergerac’s problems is his simmering alcoholism, which his sporadic attendance of AA meetings can’t wholly suppress. This is a more pitiable hero than the earlier model played by John Nettles. He’s a widower not a divorcé, caught up in grief at his wife’s recent death, vulnerable and yet a touch too wayward for his own good. His second-in-command, still called Barney Crozier (Robert Gilbert), regularly curses hm for being a lone wolf professionally, haring off on his own track and often getting other people hurt.
The prickly relationship between the two men adds a useful strand to the plotting, as Crozier investigates the investigator, jockeying for total control of his caseload while Bergerac is technically on compassionate leave. But Bergerac is an insatiable sleuth, and annoyingly good at his job. One of the almost comic elements in the piece is his seemingly insouciant ability to solve a case unexpectedly fast, using his instincts and ignoring most protocols, while Crozier sweats it out, a key step behind.
So far, Bergerac has had one case to chew on per season, which means the show’s scripts have to be well stocked with ingenious twists and engaging characters to sustain the plot’s momentum across six one-hour episodes. Which they are, though they also seem to be following a standard pattern: an opening sequence in an upmarket location featuring a violent death, then a succession of red herrings and false trails, some involving fast driving on hair-raising hairpin bends, setting up multiple prime suspects.
This is not a series for those seeking novelty: quite the opposite, it feeds a need for a traditional genre ‘tec show, nothing too shocking or disturbing, but enough to keep you watching. The cast, as is now standard practice in police procedural series, are from the classiest ranks of the British industry. Molony is currently doing a stellar turn at the the Hampstead Theatre as the physicist Werner Heisenberg in Michael Frayn’s Copenhagen; Lesley Sharp (pictured above with Camilla Beeput) delivers one of her best TV appearances to date, as the wizened mother of a giant bearded son (Turlough Convery), who is a chess whizz but also a childlike disturbed man, and of an adopted troubled daughter, Nicola (Camilla Beeput); and, reliably snippy, Zoe Wanamaker (pictured below with Adrian Edmondson and Chloë Sweetlove) contnues as Charlie Hungerford, with Adrian Edmondson on twinkling form as her squeeze, Nigel, and Chloë Sweetlove in a nicely judged turn as her grand-daughter KIm..
Directors change from episode to episode but there seems to be a house-style, of ingenious but not over-flashy camerawork — this series’ opening sequence is exemplary, using a camera on the bottom of a swimming pool for an eerie scene that doesn’t end the way you expect. Ditto an impressively twisty sequence involving a cop from the drug squad as he hunts down a heroin addict. There's also a deft touch at work on the script’s flashes of quirky humour.
A light touch is the keynote throughout. Bergerac’s Roadster could have been milked for its metaphorical content — like its owner, a handsome vehicle that’s not functioning under the bonnet — but it isn’t, making just a brief late appearance. Not unlike Bergerac’s troubled mental state, which eventually manifests itself in all its ugliness in a scene at his daughter’s going-away party. Although Molony is an engaging performer, his character could do with a more thorough-going complexity if that is to be his USP. A sense of real danger wouldn’t go amiss, either.
Mostly, this is a tasteful series designed not to frighten any horses. Instead of grit it offers warm sand between the toes. You do wonder how many times Bergerac can go into a semi-trance like state, focus on a picture or recent conversation and miraculously come up with the solution to a knotty problem in his case. Or how many times a character who doesn’t know who he is, congratulating him on an astute piece of deduction, gets to say, “You should be a detective.”
All episodes of Bergerac season 2 are available at U&Drama and the Channel 4 hub
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