Why it’s time to put ordinary cops back on TV
You can’t move for ‘maverick’ detectives. But, says Jake Kerridge, none of today’s crime dramas show the reality of policing
HPolice criticised ‘The Bill’, years before Stephen Lawrence, for saying racism was rife in the force
ere is an appeal to British television’s drama commissioners. There is a huge gap in the schedule that needs to be filled – though, I admit, not an obvious one. We need another police series. This plea may remind readers of the man in the bar of the Titanic who asked for more ice. Most tellywatchers will feel there is already a surfeit of British police shows. Three new ones are just beginning – The Long Call, Dalgliesh and The Tower
– to say nothing of the prime-time Friday night repeats of Midsomer Murders.
Nevertheless, it’s high time we had a show that reflects the realities of policing a bit more. The problem with the series mentioned above is that they all follow the same formula: they are whodunits, with the focus on a CID team – or, more accurately, on a lead investigator with a satellite cluster of less roundly characterised colleagues.
There are so many of these dramas now that they tend to blur in the memory into one amorphous show called DI Maverick. Was that cold case storyline I’m half-remembering investigated by Bancroft or Marcella? It’s no wonder dramatists are starting to send their police detectives on to submarines ( Vigil) to make their shows stand out.
Some of these programmes are admittedly excellent. I love Unforgotten, Chris Lang’s cold case series with Nicola Walker, and I thought that the first episode of Channel 5’s Dalgliesh, which aired on Thursday, was beautifully written and acted. But the more of them there are, the more they infect each other with a cumulative unreality. If every murder investigation on the box involves middle-class suspects who live in beautiful homes, it becomes harder to suspend your disbelief. One recalls Raymond Chandler’s plea in the 1940s for crime fiction to return to the “mean streets”, to take crime “out of the Venetian vase and [drop] it into the alley”. Could we have at least one British crime drama that does the same?
It was not ever thus. Some of the most fondly remembered shows on British television acknowledged that there was more to police work than homicide investigation, and concentrated on everyday policing – what we might call police procedurals, if the phrase hadn’t been hijacked by the whodunits. (As if “police procedure” consisted of interviewing people in a superior manner, waiting for a second murder to give you a few more clues, and then shouting at the main suspects until they confess everything, in lieu of actual evidence.)
The grand-daddy of the proper police shows was Dixon of Dock Green (1955-76), in which PC George Dixon (Jack Warner) gently and commonsensically sorted out what the programme’s creator, Ted Willis, called “the smaller everyday type of crime”. Dixon was an idealised figure and the show wasn’t always exactly actionpacked – Warner was, after all, 80 by the final episode – but it did at least attempt to show how an ordinary bobby went about his work.
Next came the much grittier Z Cars (1962-78); little-known actors were cast in the lead roles, and the producers insisted that no cast list appear in the Radio Times in order to maintain the sense of the show as a documentary.
Its lead writer, Troy Kennedy-Martin, wanted to show that the North of England had something of the “rawness of the Wild West” compared with the South – one of his inspirations was learning about a group of Scouts who were obliged to stay up all night guarding the items they had collected for a jumble sale. It depicted a community riddled with crime and violence, but did not exaggerate the situation for the sake of melodrama – Martin insisted only one murder would occur in the first season of 13 episodes.
The focus on a large ensemble cast, rather than an individual star of the show, enabled the programme to convey what it was actually like to work in a police station – something later emulated by British television’s most enduring cop show, The Bill (19832010). Here was a programme that devoted as many episodes to the misadventures of PCs Tony Stamp and Reg Hollis on the beat as it did to the more high-octane activities of the CID.
The programme was unique in conveying the real sense of a police station’s buzz and bustle, not least because so many scenes were set in the canteen, which doubled as the real canteen used by the cast and crew – you could almost smell the grotty sausage sarnies. In most police dramas today you will get to see inside swish offices or dramatically dank interrogation rooms, but nothing as humble and ordinary as a canteen seems to exist.
Sadly ITV executives decided realism was out of fashion and made The Bill more and more soapily melodramatic: viewing figures plummeted and the show was eventually axed. But surely it would be worth reviving if it were allowed to return to its realistic roots?
Nowadays, the place of these dramas has been taken by reality shows such as 24 Hours in Police Custody, and riveting they are too. But inevitably they offer a very partial view of police work, sanctioned by the police themselves.
Dramas, on the other hand, do not need police approval. The first episode of Z Cars depicted one officer as a wife-beater and another as an obsessive gambler, leading to outraged complaints from the Police Federation; the end credits acknowledged the help of the Lancashire County Police in the making of the programme, but this was rapidly dropped at the insistence of the Chief Constable.
A quarter of a century later, the Police Federation criticised The Bill
– many years before the Macpherson Report – for suggesting that racism was rife among the police. A good, bold, realistic, warts-and-all drama can hone in on the truth of what is going on in the police service long before inquiry chairmen and documentary-makers set to work.
There seems a pretty urgent need for a drama that digs down into the dynamics of modern policing as The Bill used to do: that tells us how a patently dangerous man like Wayne Couzens, Sarah Everard’s murderer, can flourish in the force without his colleagues intervening; or how a laddish, compassionless culture becomes so embedded that two officers find it funny to take photographs of murdered women, superimpose their own faces on them and share the pictures in mocking WhatsApp messages – as happened in the wretched case of the murder of the sisters Bibaa Henry and Nicole Smallman.
For the sake of both variety and edification, then, here’s the plea we should be making to television executives: please may we have our Bill back?