Bergerac: 'darker' reboot of the eighties crime drama

Damien Molony, Bergerac. — Damien Molony as Bergerac: 'mired in grief'

(Image credit: Colin Hutton / UKTV)

"Ah, 'Bergerac'," said Ben Dowell in The Times: "that twangy guitar and accordion earworm theme tune; that lovely John Nettles burr; a world of sun, sea, shoulder pads and our man's burgundy-coloured, open-topped Triumph Roadster". The 1980s BBC series, set on Jersey, was "the kind of TV perfection that no self-respecting viewer would want to be tampered with". Yet now it has a reboot (streaming on the free-to-view platform U) and, remarkably, it is not bad at all.

Starring the Irish actor Damien Molony, this is not "Bergerac" as we know it, but it's not meant to be, and it works "on its own terms" as a "darker, slightly more pained, noirish drama". Whereas in the "zippy original" Bergerac solved a different crime in each episode, this one follows a single murder mystery across the series, said Michael Hogan in Radio Times. This "allows for greater depth and character exploration", but it also means the pace is "slower and almost glacially Scandi in style" – with lots of shots of "characters gazing broodingly out to sea".

The mystery at the heart of the series is serviceable, said Anita Singh in The Daily Telegraph, but did the show have to be so miserable? Nettles was a "heartthrob" with a "twinkle in his eye"; Molony is "far less rugged", and his Bergerac is mired in grief, following the recent death of his wife. They have "taken the name, the location and the car, and attached them to another detective drama. And the theme tune? It has survived (but only just) in such a wishy-washy form that they shouldn't really have bothered."