Bergerac – classic & new

On Thursday – as is my wont – I watched first classic Bergerac on US Drama and later the new version with Damien Molony playing the Jersey detective.

Gone is Charlie Hungerford, necessarily so as Terence Alexander passed in 2009.

The relationship between the detective and his father-in-law – a loveable rogue with a finger in every pie – was at the heart of the original series and, needless to say, to satisfy diversity and gender criterion, Charlie is now a woman (Zoe Wanamaker).

Bergerac in the new version is a recovering alcoholic getting over his wife’s death and taking police leave.

Molony  plays this dark side of Bergerac well but not the all-action, womanising detective.

Back on the force – and working again under the plodding Barney Crozier – and again given a diversity ‘make over’, Bergerac does not believe that a murder in the home of Adrian Whitfield (Philip Glenister) was a burglary gone wrong, but an abduction.

He is correct but arrests the wrong man.

It’s not bad and I will give it a second try.

At least Bergerac’s burgundy red Triumph Roadster makes an appearance, but my initial view is that this is a classic example of a re-run being inferior to the original.

Somehow, too, the original Bergerac was of the 1980s and not the present.