SHOWSTOPPER!
After THAT Line of Duty finale, the TV hits that left us holding our breath for the ultimate...
Thank the stars for Tv — the one force that still has the power to bring the nation together. On Sunday night, as the BBC1 police thriller Line Of Duty finally revealed the bent copper at the heart of its web of corruption, up to 13million Brits were glued to their sets . . . at the same moment.
Whatever you thought of that finale — and many applauded it as subtly ingenious, while others denounced it loudly as a letdown — it achieved its purpose. We’re all still talking about it.
There’s a magical sense of community in knowing that millions of us are watching together. Every gasp of surprise and grunt of puzzlement is echoed across the land.
no other medium can do that. It’s true that lockdown has seen us rediscover the joys of radio and reading, and more people than ever are hooked on podcast serials and streaming video shows.
But we experience those stories individually, drop by drop — not in a great tidal surge together, as we do with live telly. and it’s been that way for more than half a century.
The national fascination with Line Of Duty is no different to when we were all still watching in black-and-white, in 1967. The country was divided by Soames’s domineering treatment of his wife (Eric Porter and nyree Dawn Porter) in The Forsyte Saga. That provoked arguments in homes and offices that made Brexit look like a wry difference of opinion.
Or a decade later when almost everyone was mesmerised by Bob hoskins and Cheryl Campbell in Dennis Potter’s mini-series Pennies From heaven in 1978.
In 1980, normal life all but came to a halt as in our millions we turned in to the glossy soap Dallas, to find out Who Shot J.R. (Larry hagman). Insiders refer to shows like this as ‘appointment-to-view Tv’ — the ones we are so determined to see, we clear our diaries.
and they remain as highpoints for years. You might think you don’t remember anything special about Christmas 2012 . . . until you realise it was the night Cousin Matthew (Dan Stevens) suffered his fatal car wreck, moments after becoming a father in Downton abbey.
Downton’s forerunner was Upstairs Downstairs, with Gordon Jackson as the stiff-necked butler and nicola Pagett as the family’s flighty daughter, Elizabeth.
The sense of scandal that gripped Britain in 1972, when Elizabeth’s sexually repressed husband handed her over to a friend so she could conceive a child, can hardly be exaggerated.
now, it’s mainly crime (though not always) that brings us together in breathless anticipation. Broadchurch in 2015 did it, when DS Ellie Miller (Olivia Colman) broke down as she learned who killed her best friend’s son.
YOU could add to that list James nesbitt in The Missing, Sarah Lancashire in happy valley, hugh Laurie in The night Manager, Reese Witherspoon and nicole kidman in Big Little Lies — superb actors in cunningly constructed compelling dramas.
and the 2019 Christmas special of Gavin & Stacey delivered what every fan of the series had wanted to see — although it was nessa going down on one knee to propose to Smithy (Ruth Jones and James Corden) rather than the other way round.
That episode was watched by 17.1million people, the most for any scripted, ie non factual, show of the decade. On Sunday, more than half the entire viewing audience — 56.2 per cent of everyone watching Tv — was tuned in.
The average figure of 12.8million viewers surged at one point to 13.1 million, the biggest for any crime drama in 20 years. The fact that this was by no means one of the show’s better episodes (or even series) was irrelevant. kelly Macdonald as DCI Jo Davidson was neither a likeable nor credible officer — unlike predecessor keeley hawes as DI Lindsay Denton, who could be brutal, obnoxious and vulnerable all in one breath.
We were watching because we were finally going to find out the solution to the mystery.
For ten years we’d seen the dogged sleuths of aC-12 turning over stones to expose layers of squirming corruption. at last, they had a chance to get their man (or woman) — the fabled ‘h’. There’s a huge expectation in any longrunning story that the writer will bring all the threads together. Every loose end will be tied off, every question answered, every detail revealed to be significant.
Done well, there’s nothing more satisfying than the climax of a shared story. It has been a human pleasure since the dawn of language, the act of gathering around the storyteller in silence.
neil Gaiman, who created Tv hits including Good Omens and american Gods, says the most powerful human instinct can be summed up in four words: ‘and Then What happened . . ?’
It’s the question that will lure us back to Line Of Duty if the series ever returns — regardless of whether we thought the denouement was worth all that effort. I found it a crashing disappointment. The revelation that slowwitted DCI Ian Buckells (nigel Boyle) was the copper feeding information to organised criminals came as no surprise.
Writer Jed Mercurio was making a valid point — most criminals are stupid and mastermind villains exist only in Sherlock holmes stories. But we didn’t stay glued for 37 hour-long episodes in the hope of being rewarded with a mundane observation from an essay by a psychology undergraduate.
We expected to be shocked, delighted, horrified, bamboozled, dumbstruck...and for me Line Of Duty did not deliver. and I’m not
alone. Novelist Marian Keyes tweeted: ‘Like, NO! I’ve never felt so let down.’ My colleague Piers Morgan, punning on the show’s infamous, misspelt clue, called it: ‘Definately a tad underwhelming.’
And Peter Andre, who was ‘beyond buzzing’ before the finale, was sadly deflated. ‘Is that it?’ he groaned.
By the way, that in itself is a remarkable achievement. No other artform ever invented could unite a bestselling writer, a heavyweight columnist and a 1990s heart-throb, along with about 13million other people, in a simultaneous obsession.
We’ve been lucky enough to experience this several times in the past few years — with another Mercurio production, for example, Bodyguard, which in 2018 had the nation by the throat from its explosive opening scene.
Off-duty policeman Richard Madden talked a suicide bomber out of destroying a crowded train, and we were hooked. Another series is planned, though filming has yet to begin — and a further two seasons might follow.
We don’t worry that Bodyguard’s ending was also forgettable.
The climax earlier this year of The Undoing, with Nicole Kidman and Hugh Grant, was also not much cop — most people (and I don’t mean this nastily) were hoping to see Hugh hurl himself to his death from a bridge, not hand himself in meekly to police.
But for every disappointment, there’s an ending that leaves us wonderstruck.
No one could have predicted that Ricky Gervais’s mockdocumentary The Office would rise to a joyous, almost inspirational conclusion. Yet the memory of the romance between salesman Tim and receptionist Dawn, and that hint of redemption (and love) for clueless boss David Brent, can’t fail to generate a smile.
It’s enough that every show offers the possibility, the hope, of a stunning denouement... and many deliver.
Who knows when the next one will arrive? I can’t wait.