Line of Duty: how to keep an audience on their toes
We’ve come a long way from ’ello ’ello ’ello. The fifth series of Line of Duty (BBC One, Sunday) is determined not to rest until every member of the thin blue line is exposed as a wrong ’un. Bent, corrupt, on the take, up to their neck in it – you name it, all bobbies are at it. When the gang planned a raid on a police depot, Ted Hastings (Adrian Dunbar) wondered if they had backing from a panzer division. It’s not beyond the realms, is it?
This episode explored the idea of two missionary detectives who might have been separated at birth: DS Steve Arnott (Martin Compston) and his short squat combustible doppelgänger John Corbett (Stephen Graham). Fierily committed to ultimate justice, behind each of them was a woman whose trust they flouted. The whole set-up had a neat symmetry until Arnott went and spoiled the promising plotline by ’fessing up to DI Kate Fleming (Vicky Mcclure). It was rather harder to credit the gullibility of Lisa Mcqueen (Rochenda Sandall) who spent the episode side-eyeing and swallowing Corbett’s baloney.
Anyway, we’ve now got a definite lead on the identity of “H”. He (or she?) can’t spell. “Definately,” he (or she?)
typed in that anonymous computer link. Tut tut. It’s something to go on, or it would be if Corbett weren’t ignoring such vital clues as he speed-morphed from cool-headed UCO into human IED.
Is it Hastings? We don’t know if he can’t spell, but we do know that he’s hopeless with money and women and therefore vulnerable to the siren lure of the dark side. Gill Biggeloe (Polly Walker), all eyelashes and sarcasm, was teleported from Dynasty in a bad week for romantic sub-plots: DS Sam Railston (Aiysha Hart) picked the worst moment to grab a little us-time with Arnott. An associate of DCS Hargreaves (Tony Pitts), who was this week’s haemorrhaging casualty after being shot by Corbett, she’s probably bent too. With Corbett seemingly now losing his grip and heading for jail, quite what he intends to do to Hastings’s ex-wife is anyone’s guess.
There are three hours left for the plot to go any which way. It’s growing so convoluted that Arnott and Fleming were reduced to this more or less verbatim exchange.
Arnott: “Boss, I’m about to tell you what just happened in the Eastfield depot raid.”
Fleming: “Mate, as you know I already know, but spell it out for the viewers.”
Arnott: “If we talk fast it’ll look less like a blatant bit of exposition.”
Fleming: “This plot’s getting so knotty we’ve had to deploy a DDSN notice.”
Arnott: “Like I always say, Dial Down the Serial Numbers.”
There was an outbreak of cholera in the latest chapter of Victoria (ITV, Sunday). Soho was awash with it. In a parallel plot, Prince Albert (Tom Hughes) stood for chancellor of Cambridge University, where some of the electorate found him too German. Hence the episode subtitle, Foreign Bodies. One sees what they did there.
The queen’s modernising husband was not welcome among the classicists and theologians, who in their wisdom tended to view the creation of the Earth and the heavens as a seven-day operation. “This is the 19th century!” exclaimed an exasperated Albert.
Meanwhile, in the slums, the poor were dropping like bluebottles. The script made its customary deviation from history in pursuit of dramatic solutions. Thus Victoria (Jenna Coleman) made a Diana-esque hospital visit where she was impressed by a saintly nurse. “What is your name?” she enquired. There was no time to wager before the inevitable answer came. “Florence Nightingale, ma’am.”
The victims, most cruelly, included the queen’s ex-hairdresser Nancy (Nell Hudson), who made the fatal error of being all jolly and perky. When she fell pregnant, that pretty much marked her card and cued up a touching deathbed valediction that faintly recalled the traumatic passing of Downton Abbey’s Lady Sybil.
Talking of foreign bodies, something seems to have been lodged in Coleman’s larynx. Having started playing the queen as a gambolling youth with a natural voice, she’s now opted for something that she must fancy as more regal. It sounds painfully as if all the air has been throttled out of her.
It works best when Her Majesty is in a bit of tizzy and dressing down her PM Lord Russell (John Sessions) or pulling rank in her marriage. But is anyone else not amused?
Line of Duty ★★★★ Victoria ★★★