WHICH ONE OF US IS GOING TO DIE?
They’ve become firm friends after seven years on gripping police corruption drama Line Of Duty. But as series five begins, Vicky McClure, Martin Compston and Adrian Dunbar reveal the first question they ask when they see a new script...
Today’s multi-channel age of box sets and catch-up services gives so much choice, with everyone watching programmes at different times, that real event television – shows that have the whole nation waiting on tenderhooks for the next episode – is increasingly rare. But
Line Of Duty, returning after an excruciatingly long two-year wait, is most definitely it.
The show, which follows fictional police anti-corruption unit AC-12, is one of those rare beasts that’s seen each series become more popular than the last, with the most recent fourth finishing up with more than 10 million viewers in Ireland and Britain. Thanks to the success of its sister show Bodyguard (both written by Jed Mercurio, using the same production team), that figure may be eclipsed in season five.
First shown with little fanfare on BBC2 in 2012, Line Of Duty gained a cult following among police show buffs who enjoyed the fact that nothing was black and white. But thanks to word of mouth and some fantastic reviews, by the end of the series it had more than four million viewers, making it the channel’s best performing drama in a decade. It’s little wonder the fourth series moved to BBC1.
Soon a roster of top TV names – including Keeley Hawes, Thandie Newton, Jessica Raine and Daniel Mays – were queuing up to star in it, even though they knew there was a good chance they might be killed off in the first episode (three of them did in fact die, while Thandie Newton’s corrupt copper Roz Huntley got 10 years for manslaughter).
Its jaw-dropping cliff-hangers and the way it tugs at our emotions mean we’re constantly questioning who the good cops are and who are the bad. Even the show’s stalwarts, Superintendent Ted Hastings, DI Kate Fleming and DS Steve Arnott (played by Adrian Dunbar, Vicky McClure and Martin Compston), have come under suspicion. BBC director-general Tony Hall, a huge fan who even spent a day on set trying to get the actors to reveal secrets, has admitted, ‘Everyone I know has a theory about whether we can trust Ted Hastings. You may think I know the answers but nothing is further from the truth.’
Each series can be viewed as a self-contained entity, focusing on a particular officer the department is investigating, but a thread exposing a wider police conspiracy has run throughout the years and this season it will be part of the main focus.
Over the four series, AC-12 has been infiltrated by people working for this conspiracy, but the team are yet to discover whether the mysterious ‘H’, the mastermind who is both a senior police officer and the head of a major crime organisation, has been removed from the scene. By the end of the last series, a corrupt senior police officer, ACC Derek Hilton, was unveiled as being part of
the conspiracy and ended up dead. But there is still the very strong possibility he is not the main villain, so the hunt for H continues, with Hastings still under suspicion. But would a criminal mastermind really use a nickname that’s the first letter of his surname? ‘I’ve had people say to me, “If Hastings is bent, I’m cancelling my licence fee,”’ laughs Martin Compston, 34, when I meet the three actors who make up AC-12 ahead of the series’ premiere. ‘No one wants it to be him. They want him to be good.’ Adrian Dunbar, 60, agrees. ‘Everyone loves Ted – that sounds like it should be a rom-com movie, doesn’t it? But Hastings has been in the spotlight since the end of the last series when Kate Fleming shot him a suspicious look and he shot her one back. You think, “What’s going on there?” He’s having personal problems and that’s something we definitely explore. The thing with Line Of
Duty is you never quite know... ‘From the start we see that Ted is on shaky ground financially. He owes people money, and – as we know from the previous series – money problems can open people up to situations. Kate and Steve aren’t afraid to go after him – they’re like pitbulls – and I think they’ll butt heads at some point. You’ll have to see how that pans out. But Jed has created these characters that people love. They really love them all. As the series has gone on, viewers have got more and more involved with these people.’
He reveals that just a day earlier some real police officers had stopped their car to talk to him and express their love for Ted. Not that this sort of affection has ever stopped the show’s creator from killing off people without, it seems, a moment’s hesitation. It means, as viewers, we are constantly put through the emotional wringer, unable to take anything for granted. ‘You never know with Jed,’ says Adrian. ‘When Jessica Raine was killed in the first episode of series two [she played a new AC-12 recruit who was pushed out of a window] no one could believe he’d do that to the nice girl from Call
The Midwife who was obviously going to be a major character. The first thing you do when you get a script is check you’re not dead. And then you check that the others aren’t dead.’
For Martin, the affection for his character in the last series, when it looked like Steve might be a goner after he was attacked by a mystery man in a balaclava and thrown over some stairs, was genuinely shocking. ‘There was this outpouring of love,’ he says. But it was not as shocking as when he read the scene. ‘I was filming something else in Glasgow when I met Vicky, who was also filming there, for a drink. She said, “Have you read episode
three yet?”’ recalls the Scot, who does a brilliant job of masking his accent with Steve’s flat London vowels. ‘We’d been sent the first three scripts but because I was filming something else, I was trying to keep my mind on that role so I hadn’t read them. I said, “Is it bad?” and she said, “Ye-e-es!” I said, “Am I dead?” and she shrugged.’ He quickly read the script to see the line, ‘And Arnott is thrown over the stairs.’ ‘I phoned Jed, who said, “Don’t panic.”’
When the episode aired, with Steve left in a pool of blood, viewers wept and spoke of their shock. For some, it was a long week until the next episode. Thankfully Steve lived to see another day, although he was in a wheelchair. This series, he’s back on his feet – although he still has a back injury. But Martin says he wouldn’t blame Jed for killing one of them off. ‘It’s been the job of a lifetime for all of us,’ he says. ‘It’s changed my life. We’ve had five series, so if Jed decided it was time for us to go, we’d have to accept it and say thank you for the memories.’
The three lead actors live in adjoining flats while they film the show in Belfast, and after more than seven years of working together there’s great affection between them. Adrian does the cooking apparently, while Vicky’s flat is used for learning lines and Martin’s is the ‘party flat’. So could
Line Of Duty really carry on without Steve – and his collection of waistcoats? ‘Oh, the waistcoats,’ laughs Martin. ‘When we first thought about this character our costume designer said all the great detectives wore waistcoats, and as Steve is a bit of a smart***e and probably would be the overdressed guy at work, it made sense to make him wear one too.
‘The waistcoats have taken on a life of their own. They’ve got more and more elaborate but when, in the last series, he started wearing these double-breasted things I asked for it to be toned down. You have to know where to draw the line, even when it comes to waistcoats.’
Series five picks up two years after the last one. Ted is going through a nasty divorce while Steve, who over the years has slept with several witnesses and even a suspect, is now trying online dating. Kate, who split from her husband (the father of her son) in an earlier series, seems more settled. ‘We don’t see that much of Kate’s home life but I’ve brought my nephew back to play my son Josh,’ reveals Vicky, 35. ‘He was in it in series one. When I first read the script it said Kate had a daughter and I asked if they could make it a son so I could use my nephew, and all these years on he’s still got the part.’
As ever, the show starts brutally. Drugs are being moved by armed police officers to an incinerator but during the journey there’s an ambush and three officers end up dead. The gang of balaclava-wearing criminals had inside information about the police operation. And they could only have got that information from an insider, so AC-12 are brought in and they find themselves investigating the very real problem of organised crime.
‘This time we’re investigating actual criminals,’ says Martin. ‘We’re meeting the men and women behind the balaclavas. They are very dangerous criminals and we’re going to land in some very dangerous situations. They are our scariest adversaries yet. With most of
the other characters we’ve investigated, they were forced into murder or crime, but these people are out-and-out criminals and they’re not afraid to kill.’
The kingpin of the group is John Corbett, played by Stephen Graham, and his rival within the organisation is Lisa McQueen, a role taken by Rochenda Sandall. Vicky is old friends with Stephen as they both worked on Shane Meadows’ gritty drama This Is England, and she says having him on set was a mixed blessing. ‘It was exciting because everything he touches turns to gold,’ she says. ‘He’s a lovely guy and a great friend, but I think we all felt we had to step it up to another level. We had to pull our socks up because he’s a powerhouse. The casting for the show has always been interesting – never obvious.’
It means that once again we’re set for some thrillingly tense interrogation scenes – which have become a trademark for the show. ‘The audience loves them,’ says Vicky. ‘When everyone wants things instantly and we’re becoming less patient, this is something different. There’s that annoying beep from the tape recorder at the start and you can feel the tension rise as someone sips at their water.
‘Everything in the scene has a purpose, and the viewers look out for things. Is she dodgy because she scratched her ear? We will work on those scenes for a couple of days, going over and over them, but they’re filmed in one long take. It’s how it works in the police force – when you’re dealing with a case you sit and grill someone until they break. So that’s what we have to do.’
The show has already been recommissioned for another series so it’s impossible to know whether we’ll get to know the identity of the mysterious H this series. But it seems we all love the ride of not knowing. ‘You’d imagine that when people come up to me they’d be asking what happens next and who is H, but they actually say, “I love the show, it’s fantastic but don’t tell me anything,”’ says Adrian. ‘There’s this incredible thing that they like to watch it along with everyone else, as it goes live. The next day people get together and talk about it and that is interesting in itself.’
Line Of Duty returns tomorrow at 9pm on BBC1