First broadcast on FAB RADIO INTERNATIONAL at 19:00 on May 21st 2023

Long time listeners to VISION ON SOUND will already be aware that PAUL CHANDLER, THE SHY YETI, our returning guest on this week’s edition, is a very avid fan of the TV detective series BERGERAC, and, whilst he has mentioned this from time-to-time on his appearances, we realised that we’d never had a sit down to just talk about that show.

So this week we decided to rectify that omission, and for the next hour we have a nice little chat about what it is about that particular cop show, mostly set on Jersey, the largest of the Channel Islands, which he found appealing enough to ensure that he not only has the complete series on his shelves so that he can watch it whenever the mood catches him, but also that he has an emergency backup set of BERGERAC just in case the first goes wrong, and yet another set – albeit one featuring inferior edits of the programmes – stashed in another place in case the first two can’t be accessed.

Think of it as being a bit like prepping for archive TV enthusiasts.

The series BERGERAC was first made and broadcast by the BBC in 1981, and continued to make regular appearances in the schedules for more than a decade, finally signing off, nine series, and eighty-seven episodes later on Boxing Day, 1991, and seems slightly unusual nowadays for not being a detective series based around characters adapted from a series of novels.

BERGERAC was created by ROBERT BANKS STEWART, as is rather well known, as a replacement for his previous series SHOESTRING which came to a sudden abrupt end, and left the BBC looking around for a similar but different Detective series to fill its place in the schedules, and, BERGERAC must be considered to be a very successful solution to a rather interesting problem.

The series starred JOHN NETTLES as JIM BERGERAC, a detective with a troubled past, TERENCE ALEXANDER as his troublesome ex-father in law CHARLIE HUNGERFORD, and SEAN ARNOLD as his boss BARNEY CROZIER at the newly formed  “BUREAU DES ETRANGES” on the Channel Islands, alongside several glamorous women like CECILE PAOLI, CELIA IMRIE, LOUISE JAMESON, THERESE LIOTARD, DEBORAH GRANT and LISA GODDARD, who seemed to find Jim irresistibly attractive, sometimes for several seasons in lead and guest roles, alongside a whole host of exactly the sort of character actors that the likes of viewers like me enjoy spotting in these kinds of shows.

BERGERAC made the most of its picturesque JERSEY locations, and the vintage 1947 burgundy-coloured TRIUMPH ROADSTER Jim drove, to delight audiences across the 1980s, and PAUL has very fond memories of growing up watching this series, not least because of the childhood holidays he spent on the island.

PLEASE NOTE - For Copyright reasons, musical content sometimes has to be removed for the podcast edition. All the spoken word content remains (mostly) as it was in the broadcast version. Hopefully this won't spoil your enjoyment of the show.