A crusade against sexism ... what would they say on The Sweeney?
How TV cop dramas have changed since the days of Sergeant George Dixon and Jack Regan in The Sweeney. Perhaps it should come as no surprise that veteran detective hero Inspector George Gently (BBC 1) returned for a final hurrah and celebrated solving another case by standing on the sidelines of a women’s protest march and nodding at the placards in approval.
This was 1970 and the old war horse, played by 72-year-old Martin Shaw, was on one last crusade against sexism before the chief constable put him out to pasture.
He was ably backed up by his suffragette sergeant, DS Rachel Coles (Lisa McGrillis), who interrupted one scene to launch an impassioned rant about the shortage of senior female judges.
Those politically incorrect dinosaurs on ITV’s period crime dramas Endeavour and Prime Suspect 1973 might have sneered at DS Coles, told her to stop getting her tights in a twist and put the kettle on, there’s a good girl.
But George Gently is a copper from central casting at the BBC. He applauded right-on Rachel’s speech, his eyes moist with pride.
In nearly the last case of his career, George was investigating an eight-year-old murder. He was convinced an innocent woman had been jailed — his suspicions aroused, perhaps, by the fact that everyone looked exactly the same in the 1962 flashbacks as they did by the start of the next decade.
The only difference was that Inspector Bacchus (Lee Ingleby) had stuck some ginger wisps, seemingly gleaned from a moulting tomcat, on his jawline for that Seventies sideburns look.
Insp Bacchus has been like a surrogate son to George for years, but a slip of the tongue revealed him as a chauvinist pig, and the friendship was ruptured.
Unforgivably, the junior copper suggested that a battered wife did not have the automatic right to gut her husband with a kitchen knife.
George’s eyeballs bulged in disbelief. He looked like a BBC executive who has discovered hummus on his dessert plate instead of dairy-free soya sorbet. ‘what!?’ he roared.
Poor old Bacchus realised he had committed a terminal faux pas, but it was too late to retract.
‘If you say that again, you won’t be working in this police station or any other one,’ spluttered George. Certainly not on the Beeb, he won’t.
A more realistic assessment of feminism was delivered by Louise Brealey (best-known as Sherlock’s pathologist, Molly) in the almost-all-girl thriller, Clique (BBC1).
Her view about the women’s movement having been hijacked by an obsession with taking offence over comments on social media led her to conclude simply: ‘Get over it and get off Twitter.’
This tense, violently dark drama, based in a women’s halls of residence as two 19-year-old friends start university (coincidentally, Pippa Middleton’s alma mater, Edinburgh University), has been available online and generating ecstatic reviews since March.
It kicked off with a double episode that ricocheted between riotous partying and sordid suicide attempts, all of it marinaded in gallons of tequila.
Aisling Franciosi and Synnove Karlsen are both excellent as childhood chums Georgia and Holly, whose friendship crumbles when they make new friends among the ‘cool set’ at college.
If you recoil at the sight of women taking drugs and drinking themselves into a stupor, though, you won’t enjoy it.
Never mind student loans — the millennial generation will need government grants for liver transplants.
GADGET OF THE WEEKEND: The Doctor (Peter Capaldi) might now be blind, but his dark glasses are capable of sending emails between parallel universes in Doctor Who (BBC 1). That’s what the galaxy needs... spam from the fifth dimension.