Set in North East England during the 1960s, Inspector George Gently follows the eponymous incorruptible detective who relocates from London to Northumberland following the murder of his wife, taking on one final case before an intended retirement that never quite arrives. Paired with the brash, ambitious young Detective Sergeant John Bacchus, Gently confronts murders entangled with a rapidly changing decade — social upheaval, shifting morality, and a Britain caught between old certainties and new freedoms.
Inspector George Gently is a British crime drama produced by Company Pictures for BBC One, loosely based on the Inspector Gently novels by Alan Hunter. The series ran from a pilot broadcast on 8 April 2007 through to its eighth and final series in 2017, comprising 25 episodes in total. Martin Shaw stars as the eponymous Chief Inspector George Gently, an experienced, principled London policeman whose wife’s murder — at the hands of a notorious gangster — pushes him toward retirement, delayed indefinitely once a case in the North East catches his attention and draws him into a new working life.
Gently is paired with Detective Sergeant John Bacchus (Lee Ingleby), a brash, ambitious Geordie officer who plays fast and loose with procedure and functions as both foil and surrogate son to his more measured superior — a character with no direct counterpart in Hunter’s novels, invented specifically for the television adaptation by creator and writer Peter Flannery. Their partnership, and the generational and moral tension between Gently’s old-school integrity and Bacchus’s impatient ambition, anchors the series across its ten-year run, supported by PC (later Sergeant) Taylor (Simon Hubbard) and WPC/Sergeant Rachel Coles (Lisa McGrillis).
The television adaptation made a deliberate and significant change from its source material: Hunter’s novels are set in Norfolk, drawing on the author’s own East Anglian upbringing, but the series relocated the action entirely to North East England — centring on Newcastle upon Tyne, Northumberland, and County Durham — giving Flannery scope to move beyond straightforward adaptation into original storytelling exploring social upheaval in mid-20th-century Britain. Rather than close adaptations of Hunter’s novels, most episodes draw only loosely on his procedural style and central character, with Flannery using the 1960s setting to explore racism, class conflict, the sexual revolution, and shifting attitudes toward capital punishment (abolished partway through the series’ timeline, itself used as a plot point in earlier episodes).
The series progresses in approximately real time across its run, beginning in 1964 and concluding in 1970 by its eighth series — a structural choice that lets the show track Britain’s decade of transformation directly through its characters’ ageing and evolving attitudes. Reviewers consistently praised the show’s striking cinematography and its evocative sense of place, and the series attracted a string of notable early-career guest stars, including Richard Armitage, Shaun Evans, Sarah Lancashire, and Jill Halfpenny.
For financial reasons, the first two series were filmed largely in Ireland rather than the North East England setting the story depicts, before production moved to genuine Durham and Northumberland locations from later series onward, supported by funding from the North East Content Fund. Inspector George Gently remains a well-regarded example of British period crime drama’s ability to use a specific regional setting and steadily unfolding historical backdrop to elevate what could otherwise be a straightforward procedural into something more thoughtful and socially engaged.
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