Two detectives, one in Jersey with a drink problem and a vintage car, one in Midsomer with a wife and a three-piece suit, and Nettles played both by doing less than anyone else in the frame. It is harder than it looks.
Fi1m perspective
Watch DCI Tom Barnaby arrive at a body in a Midsomer garden and notice what he does not do. He does not crouch, he does not swear, he does not stare into the middle distance. He asks the nearest person a decent question and listens to the answer, and when the answer is a lie his mouth sets, lips pressed, and that is the whole of his reaction. John Nettles spent fourteen years and 81 episodes doing roughly that, and there was nothing lazy about it.
The career divides cleanly in two. After repertory, the Royal Court and early television in A Family at War (1971–1972) and The Liver Birds (1972–1976), Robert Banks Stewart gave him Jim Bergerac in Bergerac (1981–1991): a Jersey detective off the drink, with a vintage car and a private life that kept going wrong. It ran to 87 episodes and made him a household name. He then did something the household did not expect and spent five seasons with the Royal Shakespeare Company, in The Winter's Tale, Julius Caesar and Richard III, before Brian True-May cast him in 1995 as Barnaby, the part he played in Midsomer Murders from 1997 to 2011.
The two detectives are opposites, and Nettles has said so himself: "Barnaby wears three-piece suits. He's a regular cop, middle-aged, fat, happily married, not dysfunctional in any way". Bergerac was the wounded one, and the eighties liked wounds. Barnaby has no dead partner and no past he refuses to discuss; he goes home to Joyce and eats what he is given. The stage years sit underneath both. His voice is clear without being loud and he never crowds a scene, which is why an ensemble of eccentrics can go about its business around him and the episode still has a centre. We scored Midsomer Murders 66, and most of what we admired in it was him.
Somewhere deep into the run we found we were fonder of him than the plotting had done anything to earn, and it is because he never once asks for it: no speeches, no raised voice, a small smile at the vicar and then home for supper. That restraint is also the limit. Neither series was built to test him, the Midsomer scripts in particular barely changed in fourteen years, and a performance that steady can be mistaken for no performance at all. When he turned up in Poldark (2016–2017) as Ray Penvenen it was pleasant to see him, but the part did not ask for anything Barnaby had not already shown.
He declined a cameo in the 2025 revival of Bergerac on the grounds that he was too old and would get in the way. Nobody who watched him for fourteen years will believe he could get in anyone's way. It is exactly what Barnaby would have said.
Biography
John Nettles is an English actor and author. He was born on 11 October 1943 in St Austell, Cornwall, and studied history and philosophy at the University of Southampton before beginning his career in theatre, including work at the Royal Court Theatre and later with the Royal Shakespeare Company.
He first gained prominence on television in the 1970s in series such as The Liver Birds and A Family at War. Nettles became a household name playing the title role of Detective Sergeant Jim Bergerac in the BBC series Bergerac (1981–1991). He later starred as Detective Chief Inspector Tom Barnaby in the ITV series Midsomer Murders (1997–2011).
Nettles has also appeared in other television roles including in Robin of Sherwood and Poldark, narrated documentaries, and written books on the history of the Channel Islands. He was appointed OBE in 2010.
