TV tie-in publications have been popular for decades, and continue to sell strongly. The team behind Ghosts have produced two volumes that re-present material from the series, re-styled to fit a book format, in much the same way as The Goodies did fifty years ago. And there is a strong tradition of novelisations – indeed the Andrew Davies A Very Peculiar Practice books are among my favourite novels in their own right. But for the 1980s series Bergerac two very different approaches were taken, with differing degrees of success. Today we look at two classic tie-in publications: Bergerac: the Jersey cop and Crimes of the Season, by Michael Hardwick and Andrew Saville respectively.

The best bit about Bergerac: the Jersey cop is the front cover – the line ’He turned his back on a million for a policeman’s pay’ which has parallels with my vintage copy of The Graduate. The book presents the first four episodes from series one. With each episode getting about 40 pages there is not much scope to do other than present the script, though the injury that causes Jim Bergerac to spend months out of action and to seriously tackle his alcohol addiction is given a chapter of its own which works well.

It seems that the book was published for the 1981 Christmas market, and was therefore written before series 1 had been shown. BBC Books’ brief to Hardwick seems to have been to keep things serious. As a result you get sentences like:

‘Detective Inspector Barney Crozier was not a particularly astute man, having only recently attained his rank after a slow plod, but as he entered the office he needed no more than a glance at the plump bureau secretary’s twitching shoulders to recognise her state. He made no concession to it.’

‘Slow plod’ is quite a witty pun but it also describes much of both these books. Bergerac: the Jersey cop feels as though its prose style has aged quite badly. The adaptation is fairly faithful – though Simon Cadell’s appalling Cross becomes the far more sympathetic Voss. But, at a time before streaming, when even the most popular TV dramas were shown only once or twice, and when only a small proportion of the population had video recorders, these books certainly fulfilled a demand.

That said, it was to be 1985 before another attempt at novelisation was made. As far as I can work out, Crimes of the Season was published originally as Bergerac is back! This time the adaptation was handled by Andrew Saville (real name: Andrew Taylor, who some of you will know as a winner of multiple CWA daggers). Saville gets three episodes to adapt, all from series four – but the first two episodes are not among my favourites and it’s only when Philippa Vale turns up in the final third of the book that I find myself enjoying it all. That said, Saville uses Bergerac’s budding relationship with Susan Young to provide some sort of continuity between the three episodes. I also deeply enjoyed the reference to someone who seemed to be Michael, Jim’s vicar friend from series 3 episode 1, Ninety per cent proof.

Saville would go on to write new adventures for Jim Bergerac, and that would be a far more interesting experience for this reader. But in the main these two volumes don’t give us much that is new. The stories selected make better television than they do literature. For the completist fan only.