Zut alors! It’s the REAL Baptiste
...who looks more like a screen star than his TV counterpart – and solves cases just as gripping
IT’S the new drama that’s set to grip the nation, as Julien Baptiste, the charismatic French detective from BBC drama The Missing, returns for his own spin-off series tonight.
Now The Mail on Sunday can reveal that the stubborn investigator who uses his intellect to solve the most brutal of crimes was inspired by a real-life police officer.
Jean-Francois Abgrall became a celebrity in France after catching serial killer Francis Heaulme, who took as many as 50 lives.
He had a cast-iron alibi for one murder as his temperature had been recorded at a hospital 50 miles away at the time. But Abgrall found that nurses jotted down fake recordings if a patient had gone missing.
British filmmaker Nigel Williams made a documentary about Abgrall, which inspired Williams’s writer sons, Harry and Jack, to create Baptiste.
Abgrall said: ‘I can see the similarities between us: Baptiste is a man who never gives up, he will go to the ends of the earth to find the truth.’
Abgrall has left the police and now works as a private detective, but admits: ‘The job can be relentless and traumatic so I have to step back from it all now and then.’ When he does, he likes to holiday in Falmouth.
Before Baptiste starts at 9pm tonight, we unearth some clues about the new BBC1 series…