Find crime dramas just too thrilling? Plod along with Sergeant Ped Antic!
The best crime dramas strive for accuracy on everything from police procedure to the latest forensic technology. But there’s one exception to that rule — the dialogue.
Take ITV’s Unforgotten, Sunday night’s expertly plotted story of the hunt for the killer of a teenage girl, murdered on Millennium eve. Nicola Walker stars as DCI Cassie Stuart, a woman whose voice breaks with anguish at every new twist to the tragedy.
her officers are equally wrought. When the whole team sat down to phone the parents of missing girls, they needed a palletload of Kleenex to mop up the tears.
Keeping Faith, BBC1’s loopy but diverting serial about a solicitor whose husband goes missing in deepest Wales, features an inspector (eiry Thomas) whose whole career is apparently fuelled by ancient grudges and passions, long bottled up.
The contrast with buttoned-up reality, on The Detectives (ITV), is stark. As a film crew and a ‘fixed rig’ of static cameras around the offices watch the Lancashire Major Investigation Team at work, the coppers’ conversation isn’t so much stilted as mechanical.
When robbers get away with a haul of shotguns and rifles from a violent farmhouse break-in, the inspector heading the case informs us ‘there are significant firearms and ammunition outstanding’.
Police don’t find people, they ‘locate the whereabouts of these persons’. When caught, the suspects never talk, they ‘clarify’. And instead of raiding a thug’s flat, the boys in blue ‘search the premises where he resides to maximise the forensic opportunities which we need’.
Does Detective Sergeant Ped Antic go home, and say to the missus, ‘having returned to the address which is identified as my permanent residence, at approximately 6.32pm, I am hopeful of locating on the main kitchen furnishings a platter of comestible itemry’?
In other words, ‘I’m home, love — what’s for tea?’
Such awkward speech would never work in a TV drama. Nor would many of the Lancs constabulary’s cases, which are either straightforward and depressing, like the Polish druggie who attacked his girlfriend and seriously injured their baby, or inconclusive: one of the farmhouse robbers was caught but the guns were not found.
It makes for a watchable documentary, simply because it’s true. But it lacks excitement, unlike former commando Jason Fox’s final foray into cocaine territory, on Meet The Drug Lords: Inside the Real Narcos (C4).
This time he was in Peru, and there were no gang bosses — only peasants at the start of the long, murderous supply chain that takes the drug to addicts in Britain and America.
Foxy looked rattled and unnerved as his guide drove him into the hills at 3am, to meet a ‘chef’ whose job was to take the toxic paste of coca leaves and gasoline, and extract cocaine powder with the use of boiling sulphuric acid. The presenter kept eyeing a guard with a pistol, and muttering: ‘I don’t trust that shooter.’ But it was the acid that nearly killed them all, bubbling up in poisonous clouds.
Later, the local drug-busters put on a show of strength, taking three helicopters to blow up a rudimentary coca factory. It wasn’t convincing: the villainous-looking police chief took care no one was actually arrested.
No doubt there has been a bit of posing for the cameras on Foxy’s part too. But this been a thought-provoking and sometimes shocking show, made possible by his courage and special forces experience.