The Daily Telegraph - Saturday - Review
How I See It
It’s an emergency, call the police! Not the real police – we need Line of Duty
My first run-in with the police was connected to an arson attack. It was a long time ago; I was involved with a… well, I don’t want to say gang, but that’s how the police saw it. It was a group they didn’t like the look of. Hence the stop-and-search.
I still don’t know if they had any kind of warrant or legal right to stop us. We had nothing to do with the crime they were talking about. We hadn’t been anywhere near the scene. It was a tense stand-off and I for one (though I can’t answer for my brother or his friend Ned) was worried about getting home for tea. There was egg on toast waiting!
I was six. It was a case of Bugsy Malone meets The Beano. I say “stop-and-search”, it was more of a “turn out your pockets. Is that a box of matches? Oh, small wooden owl, is it. Well, just you watch what you do with that owl. Someone’s been starting fires.”
It wasn’t us. The officers were a bit too stern, I think. We went home trembling.
Still, it’s hardly Rodney King and the LAPD. I’m pretty underqualified to judge stories about police brutality and corruption. I did once get mugged by two policemen in Rio, but they were fairly polite about it. They’d had the foresight to bring guns to the encounter, so, when they explained that I should get into their car to pay a non-specific fine, and the fine turned out to be whatever money I had in my wallet, there was no need for any further unpleasantness. As they grabbed the notes and pushed me back out of the car, I determined to think of the exchange as a quirky local welcome.
I was less sanguine when a British police officer waved a submachine gun at me in Regent’s Park, but that’s another story. For now: Line of Duty! I watched the first episode of the new series on BBC One and barely understood a word of it. I noted down the line “We can keep it on the DL as long as we’ve got a chiz in MIT”, so I can remember to use it at parties. And people say Only Connect is hard to follow!
Lingo aside, I’ve recently watched the man who plays Detective Inspector Steve Arnott being a murder suspect in the Dundee crime drama Traces, so that was confusing as well. Not least because his Line of Duty accent roams around a bit and I wondered if that was a clue. He was Scottish in Traces, and in Line of Duty he’s… maybe London? There’s some sort of weird estuary twang in the mix.
He’s a good actor, but if this is his real accent and he was putting on the Scottish one, you can have all the money in my wallet. (Later I discovered that this chap has been a star of Line of Duty for nine years, so it probably isn’t a clue. If his character is actually meant to be a Welshman who’s undercover as a Cockney, someone is playing a very long game.)
What with my general bafflement over the plot, and murmurs of disappointment from some longer-term viewers (inevitable when such a cultural giant returns, especially when we’ve had nothing to do but watch telly and moan about it), I realised my mistake: I should have started with series one! I had forgotten our trusty friend, the iPlayer. No longer do audiences have to flail around trying to grasp the narrative of a late-joined serial, we can simply hop in the time machine back to 2012 and start at the beginning!
Whole first series now gobbled; and ooh, it’s good isn’t it? Pacy, twisty, original, but most of all I love the sophistication of its moral lessons. There’s so much nuance to the depiction of right and wrong. So much light and shade. It’s so complicated, so grown-up, so preTwitter!
It felt particularly salutary now, at such a delicate time for the police. As I say, I’ve not had much trouble from them myself; some might say that’s because
I’m a middle-class white woman, but so were the people who were wrestled to the ground and handcuffed at a peaceful park vigil attended by the Duchess of Cambridge. Two weeks later, the same force shut down a Good Friday church service for alleged Covid breaches. It’s not been good for them, these new powers. All gone a bit cartoon-villainous if you ask me.
Society is terribly divided at the moment, but I don’t see why we disagree about the over-policing of daily life. This should be where Black Lives Matter finds common ground with the libertarian Right, never mind drippy Centrists in between: aren’t we all chilled by the idea of having to explain ourselves to a uniformed authority figure, handcuffs jingling against his Heckler & Koch, when we haven’t done anything wrong?
“The police are the public and the public are the police”, that’s what Robert Peel said. Line of
Duty is an intricate depiction of the authentic human mess his principle should create: good, bad, heroic, reluctant, unsullied, corrupt, glorious and terrible and representative. People join the force for two reasons: bravely to do some good, and/or because they like bossing people about. Recent legislation has played too strongly to that latter group, and God save us from a force composed of nobody but them.
I’m diving into series two with relish. I’ll leave you in 2021 with series six and the anti-protest bill; you’ll find me back in 2014. I like it better.
‘We can keep it on the DL as long as we’ve got a chiz in MIT’ is a line I’ll use at parties