Trivia

The car that Jim Bergerac (John Nettles) drove was a 1947 Triumph Roadster. It was very temperamental and caused immense problems during filming when it refused to start, or to stop if the brakes failed. The engine sounded so rough that the sound of a Jaguar was dubbed over the top. Nettles loathed it because he kept scraping his knuckles or banging his knees on the dashboard. After filming on this show had finished, by which time the car was in very poor condition due to its extensive usage, it was auctioned for £34,000 sterling as part of the Children in Need appeal. The new owner later wrote an angry letter to John Nettles complaining about the state of the car.

When Trevor Eve decided to move from television back to the theatre after doing two seasons of Shoestring (1979), its creator, Robert Banks Stewart, was left with a lot of leftover ideas, so he developed a new series about another rehabilitating detective, this time based in Jersey, which explains the similarities between this show and Shoestring.

This was an expensive (by UK standards) show to produce at the time due to the amount of location filming off the UK mainland. This is why it was a co-production by the BBC with an Australian TV network.

Despite being born in Cornwall, England, many people erroneously think that the show's star, John Nettles, really does hail from Jersey, such was the public's close identification of him with this series. He has since narrated and appeared in many documentaries about the Channel Islands too and for a while his image was used for tourism purposes.

The location used as Jim Bergerac's (John Nettles') rustic barn-conversion house in seasons one through three was later submerged when the States of Jersey flooded the valley to create the Queen's Valley reservoir in 1991. Plans for the construction of the reservoir were referred to in season four, episode one, "The Last Interview", with Jim first meeting Susan (Louise Jameson) in her job as an estate agent to find him a new home.