It’s not just Line Of Duty that lost the plot
LINE OF DUTY is over, but it is not over. Series six might have ended but the nation fumes on, blazing away in a bonfire of plot-point furies. When it was revealed that it was dimbulb Buckells who was the fourth man, there were howls of outrage. Viewers felt emotionally swindled; cheated of their investment of time and passion in a television series that began nine long years ago. But what did they want?
Many would not have been happy unless Chief Superintendent Patricia Carmichael had been chased around the Palisades Shopping Centre by a brace of helicopter gunships while Fleming ran off with Davidson to live and love for ever in Chocolate Box Cottage in the beautiful village of Witness Protection.
Meanwhile, Tedists such as me were just grateful that it wasn’t Supt Ted Hastings who turned out to be the villain. And also that his shrivelled mojo seems to have been reinflated to previous levels of righteous vigour as he now fights his enforced retirement — and his right to star in a future series, hurrah.
But yes, i understand the anger. And there were certainly disappointments aplenty in a series where the high point turned out not to be the big reveal, but the wee donkey.
Yet the force of the reaction asks bigger questions about what we desire and expect from a television drama — and are we asking too much?
How could Line Of Duty, set in an anonymous small town, stuck fast within the limitations of its deliberate claustrophobia, continue to sustain such sizzling levels of corruption? There are only so many car chases, convoys gone wrong, in-cell murders, red herrings and bodies stacking up like smoking kippers that any series can sustain without descending into total farce.
Many accept all this as part of the fun and that LOD is at heart a pantomime, or at least it has become one.
HOWEVER, the more serious problem is that this show — and too many other dramas like it — are starting to buckle under the weight of their own self-punishing commitment to all forms of political correctness, with the cares of drama swept away by an indulgent desire by creatives to club us over our heads with their political beliefs.
They see this as their duty, and i rather wish they did not.
On social media this week, LOD writer Jed Mercurio responded to the criticism and defended his work.
‘We knew attempting to explore the real nature of corruption in our society wouldn’t appeal to everyone,’ he wrote.
Get him. That rather condescending justification underlines much of what has gone wrong with so much drama — too many see it as an opportunity for agitprop, the chance to educate rather than entertain, to shove a banquet of dogma down the throats of viewers and hope they won’t mind.
But we do mind. We know what corruption is, thanks all the same. We know what it looks and smells like, we recognise it in all forms from playground bullies onwards, we understand who practises it and who does not. We don’t need Dot Cottan to die in a hail of bullets and Mercurio to kill off half a dozen high-ranking stale, pale, male police officers to ram the point home.
He is not alone. Last year, David Hare’s political thriller roadkill (BBC One) was unwatchable, Torybashing, leftist propaganda. Meanwhile, The Crown on netflix paints the royal Family as hateful Let-Them-eat-Cakers without a single redeeming feature to their name.
Hasn’t anyone learned from Jodie Whittaker’s reign as the first female Doctor Who, when her storylines addressing issues such as the ecological crisis, racism, civil rights — and larded with plenty of negative allusions to Brexit — resulted in an exodus of exhausted viewers.
elsewhere, i don’t mind race-blind casting in period drama — in fact, i welcome it as a hugely positive step forward.
nevertheless, LOD has many strengths, but a weakness for its own virtue and a tendency to become freighted with issues. in this series, the blending of real-life crime cases with fictional ones was uncomfortable — it is unclear what point was being made with allusions to Jimmy Savile and to Daniel Morgan, the real-life private investigator who was murdered in 1987 while investigating police corruption. Apart from the obvious, which is uncomfortably obvious. in recent years, new criteria for Oscar nominees demands a wider commitment by creatives to embrace diversity, equality, LBGT groups, those with disabilities and storylines that must follow a prescribed pattern. if you don’t write preapproved scripts featuring acceptable characters triumphing over adversity, then your work will not be considered Oscar-worthy. The notion that you can’t make the art that you want, only the art that is socially approved, is bleeding out everywhere.
BUCKELLS representing the dangers of incompetence decaying into corruption, along with perhaps the banality of evil? Well, we get that — but we could have done without some of the rest.
As a nation of crossword puzzlers, problem solvers and armchair detectives, we could see that Buckells wasn’t the criminal mastermind, it was that most of the other criminal masterminds had been killed, right?
Anyway, he cannot be the criminal mastermind, because which criminal mastermind ordered the crooked lawyer to be killed in Buckells’ cell in HMP Blackthorn to frighten him? ‘Watch what happens to a rat,’ said gangster Lee Banks, as he strangled Lakewell in front of Buckells’ terrified, bulging eyes. it is not over yet.
Think about that, as you carry the fire. As you were.