First Upload March 2002 Updated 2 April 2003

Created by Georges Simenon 

Popular on television in the 1960s with Rupert Davies as Maigret in a BBC TV series, and again in the early 1990s with Michael Gambon as Maigret in a Granada TV series, the character has also featured on BBC Radio 4. In 1976 & 77 Maurice Denham starred in 19 episodes as Maigret, with Michael Gough acting as narrator, in the character of Georges Simenon. Seven years later, for Saturday Night Theatre, Denham returned to the role in Maigret and the Millionaires. There have been two further productions with Bernard Hepton & Barry Foster both playing Maigret.
Originally broadcast on BBC Radio 4.

Update December 2002, Maigret returns to Radio 4 in a four part series of new dramatisations. See below for details.

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Issues
Maigret and the Minister

Maigret And The Minister Maigret And The Hundred Gibbets Maigret And Monsieur Charles Maigret And The Madman Of Bergerac First issued as Maigret in 1992, reissued as Maigret and the Minister in 1998. Reissue (1 May, 1998) BBC Audio (Spoken Word); ISBN: 0563409908

Maigret Goes To School Maigret And The Old Lady Maigret Hesitates The Patience Of Maigret Originally issued  (8 May, 2000)  BBC Audio (Spoken Word); ISBN: 0563553294

Maigret Goes Home Maigret Sets A Trap Maigret At the Crossroads Maigret Has Doubts Originally issued  (4 June, 2001) BBC Audio (Spoken Word); ISBN: 0563478403

Maigret: A Man's Head Maigret: The Bar On the Seine My Friend Maigret Madame Maigret's Own Case Originally issued  (6 January 2003) BBC Audio (Spoken Word); ISBN: 0563536942

Introduction from a BBC Press Office release.
    For the first time in a quarter of a century, BBC Radio 4 offers a new series of dramas featuring the most celebrated of French detectives. Georges Simenon’s Chief Inspector Maigret, the driving force of 103 investigations related in novels and short stories, appears in four stylish new dramatisations of his most famous cases. Maigret inhabited a Paris that stretched from his first case, in 1931, into the Seventies; a Paris familiar to Hemingway and Gide and later to James Baldwin, Godard and Bardot. The times were given a soundtrack by Django Reinhardt, Charles Trenet, Edith Piaf and American jazz musicians.

   The new series opens with Maigret - A Man’s Head, a classic early Simenon tale that demonstrates the defining strengths of the Maigret character - patience, empathy and generous humanity, coupled with a personal code of justice that sometimes conflicts with the state. Maigret - A Man’s Head, (La tête d ’un homme) first appeared in English as  A Battle Of Nerves, and has echoes of Dostoyevsky in its confrontation between a sardonic young man and his challenge to the best minds the police have to offer.

    The dramatist is the prize-winning playwright David Cregan.
Beginning with a jailbreak engineered by Maigret on the morning of a man’s intended execution for a double murder, the police begin an extensive manhunt for a shadowy accomplice.

  Nicholas Le Prevost is radio’s new Maigret, fresh from theatrical triumphs as Colonel Pickering in Trevor Nunn’s production of My Fair Lady, and his Benedick for the Royal Shakespeare Company. His creator, Simenon, is played with Gallic flair by the award-winning Francophile, novelist Julian Barnes.

    Joining Maigret in the hunt is his most reliable police colleague, Sergeant Lucas, played by Ron Cook, one of the most successful and entertaining of British actors. Ifan Meredith plays the disdainful outsider Radek, a Czech, a sardonic observer with contempt for the police.

   The new series of Maigret dramas leads into major celebrations for the centenary of Simenon’s birth in February 2003. Penguin will be re-publishing the novels chosen for the series and BBC Worldwide will be publishing the four dramas on cassette. Lucinda Mason Brown, a young Scottish composer, won a competition with her theme for Maigret. New music for the series is inspired by Django Reinhardt.
Producer/Ned Chaillet