Viewers have had enough of aggressive TV coppers, says the man behind Unforgotten

People often ask me why the two lead detectives in my ITV police drama Unforgotten are so reasonable and nice. And my answer is that I think there are enough messed- up, door- kicking, whisky- swilling maverick cops on our screens already ( I’ve written a fair few of them myself).

So when it came to creating the two main characters in Unforgotten – DCI Cassie Stuart ( Nicola Walker) and DS ‘Sunny’ Khan (Sanjeev Bhaskar) – I thought I’d try something new. Out went the classic car, the booze and the bad blood between the duo. Weirdly, Cassie and Sunny actually seemed to like each other.

And that seemed to strike a chord with our audience. So many people wrote to me after the first series in 2015 saying how refreshing it was to see two cops who were not only polite to each other, but also to the people they interviewed. Which was gratifying to hear, because I didn’t just steer clear of the stereotypes to make my ‘hero cops’ different, I did it because it was accurate.

I knew from my research that in real life detectives will get nothing out of a suspect if they’re aggressive and lose their temper every five seconds. They’ll get a lot more out of that person if he or she believes the interviewing officer is their friend and wants to help them. That’s when you extract reluctant truths out of people, not when you’re shouting and screaming.

If you watch any fly-on-the-wall documentary, you soon realise that most police officers are ordinary, decent people doing an incredibly difficult job to the best of their ability. The bad apples are in the minority. I believe a TV drama has a responsibility to try to reflect that truth – and it’s what I’ve tried to do in Unforgotten (the new series again revolves around the discovery of the bones of a young man, this time in a suitcase in a river rather than beneath a demolished house).

My protagonists, Cassie and Sunny, have a robust moral code and become very emotionally engaged with the lives of the people they’re investigating. In contrast to a lot of old-school TV cops, they care about them and feel a duty to investigate them responsibly and not do damage.

One of the most heartening messages I received after the first series was from a policeman who’d been a homicide detective for 20 years. He said Unforgotten featured ‘the most believable murder squad he’d ever seen on telly’, and that Cassie and Sunny ‘investigated the case just the way we’d have done’. Who needs tortured, maverick cops when real life-style detectives make for TV that’s just as compelling? Unforgotten, Thursday, 9pm, ITV.