Rescued from obscurity: one of TV's greatest ever detective series

We are lucky these days in being able to take our TV detectives for granted; we are only ever a couple of clicks away from a download or a DVD of Columbo and Poirot. Those of us who find Inspector Morse an essential balm in troubled times need him on tap: just imagine how impoverished we would be if Morse had never been repeated after the series ended, and was not available commercially.

Yet this is what happened with one detective series that had a comparable cultural impact and popular following: Maigret. Starring Rupert Davies as Georges Simenon’s Parisian sleuth Jules Maigret, the Patron of the Police Judiciaire in Paris, it ran for four series on the BBC between 1960 and 1963, and has gone down in legend as one of the great lost TV shows.

As a crime fiction reviewer, I am often asked who my favourite writers are, and it never takes long for me to start singing the praises of Simenon’s novels; and if the person I am talking to is north of 65, they almost invariably respond with a misty-eyed paean to the talents of Rupert Davies.

For many years, I have assumed that this touchstone of TV ’tec drama was a victim of the great BBC wipeout that saw the recordings of so many fine programmes in the 1960s permanently deleted so that tape could be reused.

Happily, this turns out not to be the case. Copyright issues have been resolved and now, for the first time, all 51 episodes of Maigret, restored and remastered, are being made available on Blu-ray, along with the 1969 feature-length film Maigret at Bay, Davies’s last hurrah in the role.

A booklet accompanying the Blu-ray collection, written by the television historian Andrew Pixley, reminds us how quickly and widely Maigret made an impact. He quotes a poetic tribute sent in to the Radio Times after the first series ended, from sixth-formers at South Wilts Grammar School for Girls: “He’s gone. I really don’t know how/I shall survive from day to day…/ But come what may, life must go on,/Despite the fact there’s no Patron,/And Monday evening’s just a bore/Life has no meaning any more.”

The series made a star of Rupert Davies, who soon found that he couldn’t enter a pub – and he was a great frequenter of them – without the landlord offering “a brandy, Monsieur?” Indeed, the popularity of the bibulous Maigret became a cause of concern for some: according to Simenon’s biographer Patrick Marnham, a temperance pressure group started to count the amount of alcohol Maigret consumed in each episode and an Anglican bishop asked the BBC to reduce it.

Simenon’s novels were perfect source material for a weekly TV series: because he wrote them in brief, intense bursts of creative frenzy, there were an awful lot of them and they tended to be short. He agreed enthusiastically to the project when the BBC approached him, with the proviso that he have casting approval for Maigret.

Davies, a burly Liverpool-born performer whose first acting experiences had been in entertainments when he was a prisoner of war in Stalag Luft III, was forever popping up as a policeman in TV plays and series, and was the BBC’s choice. He was dispatched to visit Simenon at the author’s home in Switzerland.

The meeting was an unqualified success. When Davies, deep in thought during their discussion, rose from his chair and went to look out of the window, Simenon exclaimed: “My God! That’s just what Maigret would do.” Davies fiddled with his pipe, searched constantly for ashtrays, and at one point became so irritated by Simenon’s wobbly desk that he asked for a screwdriver and went down on all fours to fix it – all of which, according to Simenon, was “pure Maigret”.

Simenon filled Davies in with the story of Maigret’s early life and at one point asked him how Maigret would kiss his wife when he returned home. When Davies confessed that he wasn’t sure, Simenon summoned his cook-cum-mistress Henriette Liberge to join them and instructed Davies in the Maigret method of canoodling.

Watching the series for the first time, I can see why it must have seemed so fresh and exciting at the time. The first episode, Murder in Montmartre, features a striptease in a sleazy bar – very coyly done by today’s standards, but enough to elicit complaints (“Not the kind of thing BBC-tv should introduce into the family circle,” averred Mrs CL Crossley of Budleigh Salterton in a letter to the Radio Times).

But the resurrection of this series is more than an exercise in nostalgia for oldies looking to recapture memories of a series they enjoyed in their youth. Maigret is a highly distinguished piece of work by any standards. You know it will be pure class from the moment you hear the theme tune by Ron Grainer (then a couple of years away from composing the Doctor Who theme) – a mixture of jaunty and melancholy that captures the essence of the series.

The French location scenes are wonderful, but so too are the interior sets constructed in London under the impeccable eye of the doyenne of set designers, Eileen Diss. She spent months scouring France for suitable items of furniture, ornaments, posters and cigarette packets. “Half these things may never be in sharp focus on the screen,” Diss told a journalist in 1961. “But when in a close-up you see a terribly French door-knob behind someone’s left ear, it does make just that extra difference.”

The BBC spent an unprecedented amount of money on this series, but the wisest thing they did with their money was to secure Rupert Davies – when he took on the role he was the first ever actor to sign up to a two-year contract with the Beeb.

Davies looks much older than his 45 years in the first episode – even by the standards of an era in which men seem to us to look middle-aged before they’re out of their teens. He has the face of a bruiser, but also remarkably soulful eyes. He captures Maigret’s physical strength but also his capacity for self-doubt, his unsentimental compassion, his fondness for food and wine, and his laid-back attitude: there is a hilarious sequence in the first episode in which his sidekick, Inspector Lapointe, races round Paris in pursuit of a suspect, intercut with Maigret enjoying a succession of meals.

I’ve seen Charles Laughton, Michael Gambon, Rowan Atkinson and many others take on the part, but Rupert Davies – Maigret, c’est toi! Here is a series to join the ranks of the very best of criminal comfort viewing.

Maigret: The Complete Series is released on Blu-ray on August 23, priced ￡85, exclusively from networkonair.com