Profile: John Nettles
Published: Tuesday, 19 June 2007, 9:46AM
Bergerac, Shakespeare and even panto. Find out more about the man behind Midsomer.
John Nettles is so well established as a TV star that it’s hard to recall that in 1981 he was relatively unknown. In a small way he owes his breakthrough role in Bergerac to another actor, Trevor Eve.
In 1980 Eve declined the offer to film another series of Shoestring, a drama set around a young amateur sleuth in the West Country.
So its creator, Robert Banks Stewart, devised Bergerac and John was cast as Jersey's Det Sgt Jim Bergerac.
John’s earlier work had included playing Sandra’s boyfriend in The Liver Birds and a Family at War. It became a mainstay of the BBC1 schedule attracting up to 15 million viewers an episode.
But there is much more to him than Bergerac. He has been a long-running player with the Royal Shakespeare Company, and has appeared in TV dramatisations of The Merchant of Venice and Romeo and Juliet.
He has also appeared in The Hound of the Baskervilles and starred in several seasons of panto. John has also narrated several TV series including Airport, Disaster, Fraud Squad and The Tourist Trap. A documentary about John Betjeman has led to the actor’s involvement in a new series about the West Country, for Arts World.
He is a big fan of the poet and shares a love of the area in which Betjeman grew up and holidayed as a child.
John was born in St Austell, Cornwall. His daughter Emma is assistant registrar for Jersey and John is a proud grandfather to Emma’s son, Nathan. He lives in a converted barn near Stratford upon Avon with his second wife, Cathy, and two dogs.
He said: “The series has separated me from my wife and my dogs as I live down in Buckinghamshire in the week and get attacked by the dogs at weekends because they don’t recognise me. But I can’t remember what life was like before. It’s just a life that’s altered, but very happy it is too.”