This TV review first appeared in The Andersonstown News
First, a confession: I’m not sure I’ve watched a single TV cop show – certainly no British TV cop show – since Dixon of Dock Green (inquire of Granny, Virginia, please). So I’m a late and reluctant convert to Line of Duty (BBC ONE) which the world and his mother seems to have taken to heart years ago. But last Sunday’s was an interesting watch.
Reasons for being interesting: two.
Reason 1: Scheduling. Line of Duty goes out at 9.00 pm on a Sunday night. Under normal times and even during Covid times, Sunday evenings are the time when your mind darts ahead to Monday and the start of another working week, and you wonder why in God’s name you chose the profession you did. And so your soul goes in search of is balm, diversion, comfort. Line of Duty supplies in spades.
Reason 2: Line of Duty is all about police corruption. No wonder the police in England refused to offer any co-operation in the making of this series: help you with a TV series showing how rotten we are? Geddoutahere.
So safe scheduling and courageous choice of theme – two big pluses for Line of Duty to start with.
It also has a plot that twists and makes faces at your expectation with every turn. If you hadn’t been told, would you know that cop Ryan Pilkington (Gregory Piper) (the man has a face like a grown-up altar-boy) was in fact a murderous git? Last Sunday he caused a police car to veer off the road and into a lake, whereupon he got out of the car and tried to murder by drowning a fellow police-officer and a key witness. He was successful in the first , unsuccessful in the second.
That was the one splash (literally) of violence in Sunday’s episode. The rest consisted largely of cops talking to cops, and given that the corruption of cops is at the heart of the series, the trick is to spot who’s a liar and who’s an honest cop.
Above and behind all the investigating and probing is Superintendent Ted Hastings (our own Adrian Dunbar). He appears to be on the side of the angels, but in this show you never know what further probing will produce.
In some ways, Line of Duty reminds me of Casualty – people working in a big modern-day British institution, petty rivalries and major betrayals, tension as you wait for the stretched surface to be blown open and violence, maybe death to appear.
But Line of Duty isn’t just plot. No character appears who hasn’t got a backstory, problems and draw-backs that thread into their working lives as well. Like DI Steve Arnott (Martin Compston) who seeks to uncover evil but has to take strong pain-killers because of a years-old back injury which he must pretend he doesn’t have.
Line of the week in Line of Duty? Delivered by Superintendent Ted Hastings (who else?): “We really need to interview him. And woe betide anyone who gets in the way!”
It’s a long way from Dixon of Dock Green and it’s seriously addictive.
Comments are closed.