Daily Mail

Mind-bogglingly clever, Line Of Duty will make your head whirl

- CHRISTOPHE­R STEVENS

Like an infinite sequence of reflection­s, the detectives of AC-12 investigat­e other police who are scrutinisi­ng coppers who are probing yet more police in Line Of Duty (BBC1).

it makes the head whirl so much that, if you’re prone to giddy spells, you should probably consult your GP before watching.

This show loves to keep us guessing and, after last week’s cliff-hanger saw forensics officer Tim (Jason Watkins) about to decapitate his boss ( Thandie Newton) with an electric saw, both characters were tantalisin­gly absent from the opening scenes.

We were never shown exactly what happened, and left to piece the events together ourselves from the crime scene.

The implicatio­n is that, after the credits rolled, Tim and DCi Roz Huntley struggled, and after the saw nicked his jugular he bled to death. Self-defence, m’lud.

But if DCi Roz was really simply fighting off a rabid junior officer, what has she got to feel guilty about? Why hide his clothes, scrub away all traces of her DNA, and even risk instant exposure by burgling the evidence cabinet? What else is she hiding?

The anti- corruption unit AC-12 and its ruthless inquisitio­ns will burrow down to the truth. They’ve already started, with a trademark grilling that lasted almost a quarter of an hour. Adrian Dunbar as Supt Ted Hastings was brutally good, battering Roz with questions that were more like fiery denunciati­ons from a pulpit.

And Hastings doesn’t even suspect yet that she might have killed Tim. He merely suspects her of fitting up a local lad for a series of sex crimes. That won’t go down well: the super does hate to be made to look a fool. He steamrolle­red a police union rep just for forgetting to call him ‘sir’.

All this is so absorbing and cleverly engineered that it’s a pity writer and director Jed Mercurio feels the need to crowbar chunks of clumsy, sexist dialogue into these otherwise carefully balanced scenes.

in the middle of the interview, Hastings started making derogatory remarks about women who put their careers on hold to have babies. And, in the pub, he compared his sergeant (Vicky McClure) to a dancer in Pan’s People.

That’s about as subtle as a dinosaur standing on your foot. it’s such a blatant piece of bannerwavi­ng, you almost wonder if there’s a BBC quota for right-on themes in every series. if DCi Roz starts moaning about Brexit for no reason, we’ll know why.

Some gloriously un-PC comments found their way into the Special Branch reports on Wallis Simpson during the Abdication Crisis in 1936 — including a descriptio­n of her husband as ‘a bounder-type’, Spying On The Royals (C4) reported.

Supt Albert Canning ran the operation, reporting back to Downing Street on edward Viii’s affair with a married woman. His officers tailed him and quizzed people the couple talked with, such as a kensington antiques dealer. They even tapped the king’s phone — as well as that of his brother, the future George Vi.

This was explosive stuff, backed up by documents from the National Archives whose very existence was denied for decades.

But the programme lacked depth of analysis. There was much focus on edward’s admiration of Hitler, which is well-known. it all but ignored what the government believed to be a much more direct threat — the fear that by quitting the throne, the king might ignite a communist revolution.

There is a much better documentar­y to be made about these finds.

CLIMB-DOWN OF THE WEEK: ITV bosses say The Nightly Show will be shifted to 10.30pm, with the News At Ten reinstated — but only if there’s a second series. Some chance . . . Jeremy Corbyn has more hope of being Prime Minister.

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