Bad manors: Bergerac as anti-heritage polemic

Abstract

The BBC’s Bergerac (1981–91) premiered less than a week after ITV’s Brideshead Revisited, which codified the core elements of heritage productions. Heritage and preservation were subjects of contentious cultural and political debate during Margaret Thatcher’s time as prime minister, which largely coincided with Bergerac’s run. While its case-of-the-week stories offer little generic innovation for the police procedural, Bergerac’s content and visual style anticipate the backlash to 1980s–90s heritage productions that emerges near the end of the decade. Jersey’s history, Offshore Financial Center status and its idiosyncratic relationship to the United Kingdom make it ideal for exploring intense scepticism towards unfettered capitalism, the privileges of wealth and the need for a more inclusive definition of heritage, one that accounts for people of economically marginalized status, which, on Jersey, tends to be anyone who is not a millionaire. Practically every episode of Bergerac concentrates on wealthy lifestyles, class disparity and action located at stately country houses. The goal, though, is not to romanticize them, but to critique them through its disapproving protagonist, Detective Sergeant Jim Bergerac. Bergerac operates as a polemic against wealth, consumption and Thatcherism. In doing so, it consistently advocates for a less exclusive definition of ‘heritage’ that challenges the one associated with Thatcher, lavish television adaptations, like Brideshead, and Merchant-Ivory’s films.