(This piece was originally begun shortly after series five of Line of Duty and, for reasons beyond my control kept having to be put on hiatus, and then resumed and expanded to cover all six series. Spoilers, obviously: also watch out for spoilers for Breaking Bad and Bodies
IN order to assess whether Jed Mercurio's BBC series Line Of Duty leaves much of a legacy (three outstanding series, followed by three not so great), let's start by comparing it with a previous creation of his, the 2004-2006 BBC series Bodies. That had a magnificent first season, an erratic second one and a one-off finale that was largely a return to form. Four things went wrong with series two. Firstly there was sexism: the absurd way the character of Maya was reduced to a one-dimensional harpie out to get Roger, the equally absurd way Roger's wife was written in her brief but memorable appearance (the scene where he tells her he didn't have an affair with Maya and she responds with a preposterous collection of every Soapish "I don't believe you - for no reason - and even if you're telling the truth I'm still angry with you" cliche) and the series's lax attitude towards Tony's sexual harrassment of Polly, which it seems to be trying to sentimentalise by the end. Secondly, for all the complexity of Roger and Tony, there was its tendency towards making their employees pantomime villains. Thirdly, there was the unexpected appearance of some surprisingly dumb plot ideas (a top surgeon suspended due to not paying for a coffee from the hospital canteen, a man accused of indecent exposure by the police and his wife because he got caught urinating outdoors, oddly similar to an also-unconvincing scene in Jimmy McGovern's The Street). Fourthly, the scripts seemed to lose track of how vile a particular character was: as well as trying to pass off Tony's appalling treatment of Polly as genuine love, Mercurio - and Rob - seem to completely forget that Tony attempted to murder a patient by deliberately concealing evidence of her low platelet count in order to frame Roger, and was therefore just as dangerous as Roger.
All four of these are similar to the reasons why the finale of the fifth season of Line of Duty was easily its worst episode. Instead of giving the excellent Anna Maxwell Martin a worthy role as antagonist Carmichael, she was given endless sarcastic lines: unlike Fleming, Arnott, Hastings, Denton or Huntley it's impossible to imagine her as a successful investigator, or a character with an outside life. She's there just to be mean. As with Bodies's second season, it's a move into EastEnders-level characterisation, which is jarring precisely because we know Mercurio can do so much better Worse still is Gill Bigelow, played with no subtlety by Polly Walker (although it's unfair to blame an actor saddled with such a one-note, sexist role, having to deliver lines like "Poor woman... at her age" to Ted when his wife has just been assaulted and brutally tortured), who it is hinted turned against Ted because he wouldn't leave his wife for her. As for dumb ideas, there were two. The first was the astonishing resolution of the laptop mystery: Ted destroyed it because he was looking at porn. He, the head of an anti-corruption unit, took the laptop to a centre for erasing digital data which has outside both a security camera and a sign describing what the centre does. The second was the morse code idea. As Cotton lay mortally injured, he could no longer speak, but performed morse code with his fingers to indicate there are "four dots" (referring to his own nickname) within the police upper ranks. I remember the same sinking feeling during the last Jonathan Creek (not a show I ever liked, but another show by a once-great writer), in which David Renwick tried to convince us that a man darting glances between another man, a mobile phone and then a poster which included the letter E was trying to warn the others in the room that the second man was "phoney." As with Mercurio's morse idea, you could list all the reasons it doesn't work, but it's simpler just to point out that no-one could seriously argue it is acceptable. It's a sign of a writer people don't say "no" to anymore. Both the morse and the porn ideas should have been scrapped at first draft stage.
Finally, as with the attitude towards Tony in Bodies, the way the characters talk about Corbett is bizarre. "He didn't deserve that," says Steve on seeing his murdered body, even though Corbett was unrepentant to him about his brutal murder of Steve's colleague Maneet and other police officers and played Steve audio of his appallingly sadistic, slow torture of Steve's boss's wife. This is a series in which brutality towards women gets forgotten, and with no sense of irony. Kate and Steve seem more upset with Hastings for his overly harsh discipling of Maneet then with Corbett for having her throat cut. As with Bodies, Mercurio began the show with hugely convincing characters and then lost the art of persuasion as more and more melodrama was piled on.
Series 6 is at least more ambitious, especially if we assume the bizarre non-appearance of James Nesbitt despite the use of his image in photographs and the re-appearance of two characters already taken into custody a few episodes earlier was due to Covid restrictions ruling out Nesbitt and forcing the crew to fall back on actors they had already shot with. The series starts with two dull episodes (the jargon has taken over, the opening robbery setpiece is underinvolving and confusingly directed, Jo Davison is by far the least memorable of Mercurio's antagonists - bizarrely described in the press release as the most formidable one yet - and, as with Michael Farmer in series four, I remain unconvinced as to how Terry could possibly be framed for a gangland-style shooting given his mental and physical disabilities), then we get a run of three good ones, reminding us of Mercurio's strengths and the qualities he shares with Dickens: the sincerity and power of his anger, his mastery of the cliffhanger, his stylish gothic worldbuilding, a readiness to attack institutional injustice putting so many contemporary novelists to shame, unforgettable characters and a keen understanding of melodrama and how that can become art. Quite rightly, the series continues to address the murder of Jean Charles de Menzies, and this time the murder of Stephen Lawrence is justly added to the tapestry Mercurio is weaving. Owen Teale returns as Philip Osbourne, in charge of a bungled operation in series one that killed an innocent man, now promoted to Chief Constable. Hastings's powerful line "a barefaced liar elected to our highest office," makes it to the trailers as well. It makes us think of Cressida Dick, yet it also works as a Boris Johnson reference. This is gutsy, getting close to Dickens territory, and what I want Mercurio to be fucking doing. Come on man. You can pull this off. We then get two episodes with an odd series of fake-outs, some presumably intended as irony but toothless: no James Nesbitt, no Owen Teale, no Davidson, Buckells the nonentity as the Fourth Man, Gregory Piper's Ryan (the only interesting character this season apart from the regulars) killed offscreen, not interviewed and never meeting Arnott again (like Miraslav in series 5, or Corbett never meeting Hastings) and Fairbank still having no recollection of anything. Mercurio still just gives Carmichael silly noises to make. As for Davidson and her toe-curling and thoroughly undeserved "happy ending," here we have the same problem we had with Corbett in series 5: Mercurio loses track of just how unpleasant his creation really is.
But I get what he's going for here. He's going for bathos. He's aiming to puncture the idea that there must be impressively evil villains behind institutional wickedness: instead there's only an endless array of Boris Johnsons. "Your corruption was mistaken for incompetence!" snarls Hastings at the odious Buckells. In the world of Boris Johnson and Cressida Dick, Mercurio seems to be saying, corruption and incompetence are barely worth distinguishing from one another. Some Line of Duty fans were quick to insist that yes, of course the finale was unsatisfying, THAT WAS THE POINT. Unfortunately, this confuses subject matter with execution. The sheer absurdity, frustration or tedium of something still has to be effectively dramatised. We have to feel that the frustration we suffer is the frustration of Mercurio's fictional world, not merely frustration at Mercurio's writing. Hearing Kelly MacDonald repeatedly say "No Comment" is no substitute for drama. Where Mercurio falls short is in not putting his characters in a room together and letting the emotions rip through, as has worked brilliantly in the first three series. Arnott's prison visit with Fairbank simply repeats his scene with Dale Roach in series 3. Curiously, the welcome return of Patrick Balardi's Jimmy Lakewell enlivens proceedings because Mercurio writes him with humour, a rarity for this show. But then he's killed off, and we're left with no-one interesting for the regulars to interact with. Carmichael gets her first decent line in the final scene, but, at least until series seven if there is one, it's her last line.
Was Line of Duty ever quite the masterpiece I took it for? A rewatch of all the previous series brought the answer: in many ways, yes. The first three series remain outstanding, matching the tension and visceral thrills for which the show has become renowned with terrific characterisation. The cliffhanger of the first episode of season one is one man trying to decide whether or not to click on a computer mouse. DCI Gates (Lennie James) knows that if he does so he becomes complicit in covering up a killing, and no longer an honest copper. Lennie James takes us right inside Gates's head, from every shift of his restless gaze to every movement of his hand across his face. A later terrific scene sees Gates come closer to arresting his mistress, the murderer in question. Jackie Laverty (an unsettling, entirely convincing performance from Gina McKee) tells Tony "You'll go to prison. What's that like, Tony, for a policeman? On the special wing, with all the psychos and the paedophiles. Your wife will know about us. Your daughters. What will they think of their daddy?" James's acting of Tony's enraged, tearful response - "Don't talk about my kids!" - is raw and moving, but he's just as painfully convincing in an earlier scene where he listens, not answering, to the following words from Jackie on his phone and recognises that the brutal sexuality she brings out in him is as much the real him as his love for his family:
I'm thinking about you now Tony. I'm thinking about what I let you do to me. Are you thinking about what I let you do? You know I'd do anything you asked. Anything. Nothing's off-limits for you and me, Tony. Nothing. I know what we do is wrong.
This charged intimacy is Mercurio's greatest strength. One of the show's undeniable achievements is that it expanded the vocabulary of television by combining the visceral thrills of the cinematic with the intimate nature of the medium's theatrical roots. Riveting though its action setpieces are, the most thrilling moments in the show are people talking in a room. The interrogation in the penultimate episode of season 2 is one of the most powerful scenes in the history of TV drama, with terrific acting from Mark Bonnar, including an amazing moment where we see the colour actually drain from his face. Then there's Lindsey Denton, also introduced in series 2. Brilliantly played by Keeley Hawes, Denton is one of the great characters in contemporary fiction. Hawes gives as good a depiction of lying - Denton isn't quite good enough at it for it not to show - as I have ever seen onscreen. She's also particularly good on those little moments of rage, the little moments of spite when we glimpse a side of her that makes it all too easy for her to be discredited. These are balanced by intense yet moving scenes of suffering: even after the other prison inmates have put shit in her food, she retains her wit and righteous anger. She wards off a vision of self-sabotage and potential suicidal with a steely "No" to herself. Mercurio's writing here is equally attentive to the violence, abuse and murder attempts Denton faces and to the more steady drip of everyday misery in her life: she goes from struggling to play the piano because of loud neighbours to struggling to pay the piano because her hands have been mangled in prison. While still on the run after two killers hunting her have attacked her prison transport, and having just awesomely turned the tables on one of the bastards by ramming a car into him and recording his testimony, she then runs straight back to her dying mum because she doesn't want the last thing she told her to be a lie (well, yes, we find out later it's also where she hid the bribe money she accepted.) And who will feed her cat?
Denton's single scene with poor young Carly Kirk - a grooming victim Denton has put everything into trying to save, and one of the few people to escape in Line Of Duty - in the flashback at the end of series two says so much:
CARLY: Like your necklace
DENTON: Thank you. My mum gave it to me.
CARLY: Lucky you.
DENTON: It's nothing special. I think she only picked it up for a few pounds.
CARLY: I meant that you've got a mum that gives you nice things.
Any television writer should aspire towards pulling off a brief moment as simple yet crucial and affecting as that.
As DS Nigel Morton, Gates's staunch friend, Neil Morrissey catches so well that kind of devotion and fervour that is as terrifying as it is sympathetic, and leads to brutal bullying as well as love and loyalty. His far dirtier, far more dangerous colleague DS Cottan - The Caddy - is also a splendid creation and Craig Parkinson and Morrissey are superb together: when they clash the screen is thick with menace. And then there's Tommy Hunter, the crime boss with leverage over Gates who thanks both to the writing and Brian McArdle's bravura performance is a terrifying Dickensian gargoyle who also somehow feels horribly real. For most of series one he's a voice on the phone taunting Gates. In the climax to that series, Lennie James and McArdle are in a car together, and these two terrific actors go for it: a profoundly horrible yet plausible villain and a hero who's made terrible mistakes yet someone for whom we are desperately rooting. In series two Tommy's role is briefer, but no less haunting: the Carly storyline is made more powerful by our prior knowledge of just what kind of creature Tommy is. We see him beating Carly from the distance as Denton observes them: we can't hear him but there's no mistaking that Quilp-like demon.
One flaw noticeable in series 2, is that Mercurio's writing of domestic situations can be unconvincing and clichéd, as with Roger's marital and extramarital problems in Bodies: Ted's wife Roisin ending a marriage that began when they were eighteen purely because he didn't consult her before making an investment (he wanted to surprise her) which then went wrong and deprived them of a large amount of money, never felt terribly convincing and Andrea Irvine is given little to work with to bring the character or the situation to life. There's an outright silly scene where Ted, seeing a promotion on the horizon, points out to Roisin that this means they might be able to go somewhere nice on holiday. He then discovers that he has to investigate the boss who would have given him the promotion. Roisin bustles in, telling him how much the holiday talk has cheered her up, a shameful Ted tells her about the setback, and Roisin immediately withdraws the possibility of her having a change of mind about the marriage ending and flounces out again. This might have worked with some humour, but when written in such a po-faced manner it reduces Rosin to a nagging, faintly sexist cliche of a character. Similarly lacking in texture is Kate's rocky marriage, and the idea that the police would side with the husband if he changed the locks and prevented the mother from entering her house and seeing her child is a cliche that doesn't survive the gender-swapping. These are brief scenes, though, and series two is strong enough to brush them aside.
Series three is a slam-dunk, beginning with an outstanding first episode built around Daniel Mays's performance as Danny Waldron. His playing of Waldron's different sides is astonishing acting. So much is expertly juggled here - the Sandsview abuses, Waldron's bullied team, Cottan, Denton - then that brilliant final episode. Poor PC Brickford's last scene is heartbreaking. Who could not cheer when Lindsay punches that corrupt abusive social worker in the balls? Hawes owns this role. Jonas Armstrong's performance as an abuse victim is not easily forgotten, and neither is Arnott confronting the vast but apparently insensible figure of Dale Roach (a name that clearly evokes Cyril Smith, the notorious MP for Rochdale), whose senility has allowed him to escape justice for his monstrous actions. By the time we reach the moment when AC12 confront former Chief Superintendant Patrick Fairbank (George Costigan) with a photograph of himself with Jimmy Savile, the show is doing what truly great drama should do: making the viewer think "no, stop, that's going too far" and then realise the writer's brazenness is justified. As with Jimmy McGovern's finest scripts for Cracker - especially his masterpiece "To Be a Somebody" - Troy Kennedy Martin's Edge of Darkness or Alan Bleasdale's Boys from the Blackstuff, the writer seems to be tearing open the country's stomach and showing us what's in its guts. One possible caveat is that this season moves the "will the Caddy be revealed?" arc to the foreground, and the series starts to spend too much time on shots of the Caddy in question, Cotton, glancing shiftily through blinds, excellent though Craig Parkinson is in the role. It climaxes in a riveting but crowdpleasing shootout/chase scene. The increase in more conventional excitement carries with it the faint threat of dilution.
The show starts to fall off in series 4 (shifting at this point from BBC2 to BBC1), which gets a little too concerned about who Balaclava Man is. Thandiwe Newton is fine as Roz Huntley but is given a less complex character than the previous guest leads, as is Lee Ingleby as her husband. Paul Higgins's performance as Hilton is jarringly unsubtle. The amount of melodrama in the mix becomes far too much. Line of Duty was no work of realism before, but Ifield's behaviour after Roz is stunned is a twist too many for me - especially he, a forensic coordinator, not knowing she wasn't dead (the silliest plot point in the whole show up to this point, which bizarrely Mercurio has Hastings comment on). The same goes for the confusing Dickensian coincidence in relation to Ifield buying sexual services from Hanna, who unknown to him is also the attempted drive-by kidnap victim on his latest case. As mentioned earlier, it's hard to see how Michael Farmer could be plausibly framed for the crime in question: Roz's response to the massive barrier of his having no driving licence and not owning a car is ridiculous. Yet just as the show's quality is dropping, its exposure and word-of-mouth appeal (aided by the move to BBC One) reach saturation point. Hyping up Balaclava Man and "who is H and is it Hastings?" into watercooler talking points pays off. It gets the show talked about, it gets great ratings - who cares if it's now a less interesting show? Mercurio then writes The Bodyguard for BBC One. This too pays off for him, as does the dreary reprise of "Who is H / Is Ted guilty?" fanfare for Line of Duty's fifth season. It got people talking, it was great for ratings and Radio Times covers. But this is a deal with the devil. A lot of commentators on contemporary television are very corporate-minded: try telling them that The Bodyguard was a horrific step down for Mercurio or that by pandering to "will we find out who H is in this episode" mentality Line of Duty has lost its way and they'll reply "Yeah, ten million viewers, what a disaster!" All that matters for media pundits is whether the writer has succeeded in boosting their public profile - and the BBC's - well beyond expectation. Artistic success and failure is a harder thing to get them to talk about, especially the notion that a show or writer can decline artistically at the same time as they become the stuff of watercooler chats, twitter enthusings and ratings charts. The point of selling out is that it comes with many personal benefits.
As for my problems with The Bodyguard, we could talk about the pin-up dreariness of Richard Madden as a sub-James Bond lead, Keeley Hawes's equally nonexistant character, the way this characterlessness left the sex scenes feeling like nothing other than ratings-chasing softcore fantasy, and the whitewash of taking an obviously (not explicitly, but c'mon, let's not kid ourselves here) Tory Home Secretary, giving her a bodyguard who leaps into elaborately-staged action scenes, giving them sex scenes together, casting sexy actors as both, and avoiding giving her any scenes laced with real political commentary, subversion or satire. But I'm more interested in talking about The Bodyguard's lowpoint, which comes in a disgraceful key scene in the finale. In the scene in question, a terrified Muslim wife who seemed to have been groomed into taking part in a foiled suicide-bombing with her husband turns out to be the mastermind behind it, and launches into a monologue about how foolish we all are to think of her as a victim. It's possible Mercurio thought he was making some kind of point about not seeing women as precious innocents but as human beings, but what he ended up writing was a poisonous warning not to let your compassion lead you astray. Give them an inch and they'll take advantage of it. Five months after this was broadcast, the Home Secretary announced that Shamina Begum's UK citizenship would be revoked: an unprecedented, brutal move. It's hard not to think about the role The Bodyguard played in this. The Tory Home Secretary at the time the show was being written, Amber Rudd, cited by Keeley Hawes as her main research point for her role, was a fan of the show, and was publicly thanked on Twitter by Mercurio for "an interesting and thought provoking article on #Bodyguard. Maybe she'll honour us with a cameo appearance if we get a second series!" Rudd replied "Tempting. But can I play a hard core Bodyguard?" No amount of ratings is worth a talented writer doing this to himself. (Theresa May was even asked her opinion of the show.) It's a long way from Mercurio's compassion for the woman whose husband was shot by police in the first scene of Line of Duty's first series.
Perhaps I should have seen this coming. At times there is a rightwing tinge to Line of Duty, not as offensive as The Bodyguard, but there all the same. The Bodyguard's twist is strikingly similar to Ryan Pilkington's arc in Line of Duty. At the end of series one, PC Simon Bannerjee drops Ryan off at his house, but despite his partner's lack of interest, insists on returning a moment later to give Ryan his phone number and says he will be there if Ryan needs help or someone to talk to. We don't see Ryan again until series 5, where he has returned to the same gang as an adult member and participates in several brutal murders and in rounding up victims for sex trafficking. At the end of the series he's been accepted into Police training college, cutting an informant's throat just before his interview, where he cites Bannerjee as an inspiration. The implicit warning is, once again, don't weaken, don't show them compassion, don't think they can change. If you do, they will exploit it. The use of a foul-mouthed, violent gangster child - not that different from the "feral children" that haunt the rightwing, tabloid imagination - brings to mind the character of Hob, the vicious and similarly foul-mouthed gangster child in Robocop 2 (scripted by Frank Miller, who we'll come back to later). In both instances, the technique seems to be a kind of gothic taunting to the viewer: look how sadistic we can be, we can even make children as vicious as any of our adult villains, we can place the child actors in our most sadistic scenes (in series one, Ryan tortures Arnott with a boltcutter and, after being arrested, is warned by Fleming that they break your teeth in prison "so you give better blowjobs," leading to concerns about the use of a child actor for such a scene) and in case you think this is a case of the influence of the wrong crowd, see how adept this kid is at every level of gangster activity. There is a similar sadism behind the use of a character with Down Syndrome, Terry, in series 1 and 6, with closeups of his face as he is subjected to questioning about why his semen was found on newspaper clippings and photos of a murdered female journalist. It seems to say to the viewer, "look now far we are prepared to go."
And then there's the theme of white men being brought down by unfair claims of racism and sexism, and of men being brought down because they crossed women. In series 2, Dryden had an affair with Denton and got her pregnant but refused to leave his wife for her, meaning that Denton had to have an abortion, which she describes as one of the worst things she ever did. It's a major factor in her feelings of protectiveness towards Carly Kirk. In series 4, Huntley uses her own gender and race, a moment of sexist language from Hastings and his previous investigations into Gates and Denton to weave a web of insinuations of sexism and racism to deflect AC12's inquiries. Denton does something similar, using her gender, her knowledge of Hastings's financial problems and Steve's private life to counter AC12 in series 2, and then in series 3 using a moment of weakness from Steve leading to an intimate moment between the two (which, given her use of a recording device, is hinted to be partly a setup) to accuse him of inappropriate conduct, which frees her from prison. As mentioned earlier, series 5 is dragged down by the absurdly catty way both Gill and Carmichael are written. Across her two episodes for that series, Anna Maxwell Martin as Carmichael is given only lines like this:
I can’t bear shouting. You really ought to try and be more calm...
Mmmm. There you see. We’re agreeing. This is much better, isn’t it?
I think it’s in your best interest to account for this otherwise my imagination might start running away with me...
But let’s not fall out over this. I’m sure we can all work together nicely...
Oh, I see. Talk about a pressure situation. My heart goes out to you...
This is dead language, which is not the same thing as an effective representation of dead language, just as Buckells in the series 6 finale is a dull character rather than an effective artistic representation of the kind of dull human being that lurks behind institutionalised corruption. Both Carmichael in series 5 and Huntley in series 4 also have ingratiating female sidekicks who feel designed to annoy tweeting-along viewers with their ambition and who comically get their comeuppance. Wouldn't it have been more interesting and compelling to make Carmichael as plausible a creation as Hastings? Instead she serves no purpose other than to make us think "poor Ted."
As for poor Ted and the question of whether he deserves our sympathy... at the start of Gates's story in series one, Hastings's main reason for suspecting him of "laddering" his results (i.e. exaggerating the charges attached to his arrests) is that "nobody's that good". In a rare moment where the show really addresses race, Arnott points out:
He’s got where he is because he’s had to be twice as good as the next bloke.
HASTINGS: And that means to be corrupt he’s got to be twice as bad?
ARNOTT: No, sir, but victimisation of a black officer --
HASTINGS: My best mate, we went through training together. First year out, they sent us on a job. The two Catholics. Drove straight over a pipe bomb. I was in intensive care for a month. Him, they buried. The Duty Log vanished; nobody would say a word. Don’t talk to me about victimisation. No one’s blacker than me, son.
Hastings's words there are unconvincing and self-righteous, but believably so: the show isn't necessarily aligning itself with him at his point. The subsequent series of Line of Duty have overlooked this side of him. Neil Morrissey was eloquent on these earlier strengths of the show in a featurette on the series 2 DVD, pointing that what the show does at its best is to make us realise "wait a moment, *he's* a shit..no, wait, they're shits too. Or are they?" By focusing instead on "will he be mistaken for H?" (because the intention is clearly not to convince us that Hastings might be H but to frighten us with just how plausibly Hastings could be framed) Hastings being one of the good ones becomes the show's default position. A similar thing has happened with Arnott and Fleming. Vicky McClure and Martin Compston are, like Adrian Dunbar, superlative actors, able to show us two complex human beings we never trust or like entirely, and yet who also never lose our concern, but the show is beginning to squander this, and not giving the actors enough to do other than point guns. As you watch the final shots of them at the end of series 3 you can almost hear the Dragnet theme, and the subsequent two series haven't varied much from this (Sally Wainwright's Happy Valley, another superbly-written and acted series, faced the same quandary of where quality drama ends and copaganda begins, with its no-nonsense taser-weilding heroine being both a genuinely great, complex character and the kind of police officer that excites reactionary politicians, although it's not fair to blame the show for what Yvette Cooper took away from it). Even the closing scenes of series 6, in which AC12 has been severely hobbled, emphasises the hope that Carmichael will "carry the fire" (something also stressed in the show's Twitter promotions). Racism and misogyny - such huge factors in what's rotten about the Police as an institution - are topics the show ultimately fails to confront.
Recently I've been watching Callan, the sometimes superb 1967-72 Cold War spy series starring Edward Woodward. Although Callan works for "The Section", a shadowy organisation which takes its orders from the British government and is connected to MI6, the show's excoriation of the violence underpinning nation-states - the kind of work Callan does, the kind of man he is, the kind of people Governments employ and the things nation-states do to gain power over their enemies - puts not merely the Bond franchise but serious dramas like Line of Duty (to say nothing of hateful drivel like Homeland) to shame. What's striking about Callan as a show is that it never chickens out by implying that we need things like the Section, that men like Callan are ultimately still preferable to their opposite numbers in the Soviet Union. Instead, it's honest about the moral blankness inseparable from imperialism and nation-states. Line of Duty, by contrast, has the same message as the Aaron Sorkin-scripted film A Few Good Men: yes there's institutional corruption, but there might be enough good people in this institution to defeat them, to carry the fire. Roland Barthes wrote of the "Operation Margarine" technique (named after the adverts that acknowledge people's misgivings over margarine only to nullify them, although nowadays Operation Marmite might be more appropriate), whereby you:
take the established value which you want to restore or develop, and first lavishly display its pettiness, the injustices which it produces, the vexations to which it gives rise, and plunge it into its natural imperfection; then, at the last moment, save it in spite of, or rather by the heavy curse of its blemishes [...]
It is a kind of homeopathy: one cures doubts about the Church or the Army by the very ills of the Church and the Army. One inoculates the public with a contingent evil to prevent or cure an essential one. To rebel against the inhumanity of the Established Order and its values, according to this way of thinking, is an illness which is common, natural, forgivable; one must not collide with it head-on, but rather exorcize it like a possession: the patient is made to give a representation of his illness, he is made familiar with the very appearance of his revolt, and this revolt disappears all the more surely since, once at a distance and the object of a gaze, the Established Order is no longer anything but a Manichaean compound and therefore inevitable, one which wins on both counts, and is therefore beneficial. The immanent evil of enslavement is redeemed by the transcendent good of religion, fatherland, the Church, etc. A little 'confessed' evil saves one from acknowledging a lot of hidden evil
Decades later Mark Fisher describes the same techniques in the film WallE:
Wall-E's attack on consumerism is easily absorbed. The 'insult' that provoked Kyle Smith into disgust was its image of humans as obese, infantilised chairbound consumers supping pap from cups. Initially, it might seem subversive and ironic that a film made by a massive corporation should have such an anti-consumerist and anti-corporate message (it is made clear in the film that the mega corporation Buy N Large is chiefly responsible for the environmental depredation which has destroyed earth as a human environment). Yet it is capital which is the great ironist, easily able to metabolise anti-corporate rhetoric by selling it back to an audience as entertainment. Besides, on the level of content, Wall-E ends up serving capitalist realism, presenting what we might think of as the very fantasies of capital itself - that it can continue to expand infinitely;
Totalitarianism fails because it lacks this escape valve: Capitalism and the institutions that depend on it endure because we can convince ourselves that we have dealt with the problems it inflicts upon us. Yes, there are corrupt cops. Yes, there is organised, institutionalised corruption within the police force, but if we force ourselves to endure the gritty torture scenes of fictions like Line of Duty, we deserve to be rewarded with the comfort of Arnott, Fleming and Hastings's decorated heroism, just as we can be comforted by Tom Cruise overcoming his despair at ever winning his case and reducing Jack Nicholson to impotent snarls as he is arrested and led away. Even Hastings's flaws have been diminished: he has some oddly conservative views on women and sex which Mercurio brings up rather artlessly in later series (it's odd that he should do something as self-destructive and damaging to his investigation as calling Huntley "darling" in front of her own officers, even though he hadn't used the word in the previous three series), he was tricked into investing badly and he appropriates some bribe money before it can be handed in as evidence in order to give it to the widow of a dead officer, but he's still become a Good Copper, a much less ambiguous figure than in the first two series. Arnott and Fleming were similarly much more complex in series 1 and 2, with their fascinatingly dubious treatment of Gates and Denton. By series 3, I can't help thinking that Arnott's taped moment of indiscretion is a watered-down version of the appalling sexual and emotional manipulation that undercover police officers are known to have been carrying out in real life.
As China Mieville, drawing on the invaluable work of Inquest, observes here, "In Britain between 1998 and 2009, there were at least 333 deaths in police custody, 87 of them after restraint by officers. Not a single officer has ever been convicted for a single one." This is the story Line of Duty - and before it The Wire, and before that Tony Garnett's BBC2 series The Cops - are not telling, for all their quality. Yes, the first series begins with a shooting reminiscent of the killing of Jean Charles De Menezies, just as the third series had that shattering moment involving a character's connection to Savile, but it has drifted away from that kind of integrity. Just as Western culture can produce a (genuinely brilliant and deservedly acclaimed) TV drama about Chernobyl but not one of equal quality and stature about the shameful cruelty of the handling of Katrina, Guantanamo Bay or the victims of the bombing and invasion of Iraq (just comparative duds like Treme and Generation Kill), the true nature of brutality and institutionalised racism within the Police - the story of Eric Garner, Michael Brown, Mark Duggan and so many others - is a story even feted writers prefer not to tell.
Indeed, as I was first writing a version of this piece, intended to be about my dissatisfaction with series 5, the murder of George Floyd happened. Thinking about Floyd, Michael Brown, Terence Crutcher, Tamir Rice, Philando Castile, Eric Garner and so many others, it isn't just liberal angst like Paul Haggis's initially admired but then much-mocked film Crash that seem inadequate. In The Wire, the only killing of a black man by police occurs when Prezbylewski, pursuing a suspect, fires at a man emerging from the shadows, only to discover he's killed a black police officer. In Breaking Bad, the only time Hank beats a suspect is when he beats up Jesse, who is white, during fairly unusual circumstances in which Walt has led him off Jesse's trail by phoning in fake information about Hank's wife being in hospital. He is prepared to accept any consequences. Prezbylewski insists upon resigning on the spot even when Daniels makes some move towards helping him - "No sir, I'm done." Compare that with the 52 police officers in Buffalo who resigned in protest, not at their two colleagues' brutality in knocking a 75 year old to the ground and then leaving him there bleeding, but at the fact they were suspended for it (not to mention the hideous footage of other cops standing there doing nothing, similar to the unforgettable footage in the UK of police officers looking impassively at Ian Tomlinson as he died after one of them hit him with a baton while he was walking home with his shopping.) A far cry from Hank or Prezbylewski's genuflection. We don't live in a world in which cops who brutalise suspects resign and take responsibility for their actions, nor one in which such brutality only occurs after cops are subjected to cruel and unusual provocation. This was what I wrote in my 2013 post on Breaking Bad:
Another time the show hurt me was the attempt on Hank's life in the third series. Hank - brilliantly played by Dean Norris with the intimidating cocksure amiability of a man as comfortable loading a Glock or gathering friends round a barbecue - seems, like Jesse, to be an archetype at first glance: rarely without his gun, raucously cheerful. We see the pressure mounting on this seemingly indomitable figure after he is involved in a traumatic shoot-out. After being posted to a dangerous new job in Mexico, he becomes increasingly uneasy, realising that outside his home turf he's less of an alpha male than he thought. When he loses it and beats up Jesse, he resigns. His wife urges him to put some spin on his version of events - to say Jesse attacked him first. Hank has no intention of doing so; he tells her he has failed to be the man he thought he was. We realise that Hank is everything Walt isn't: a man with the guts to act on his conscience, and to take responsibility for his mistakes. But, horribly, the script has already established that Hank's murder has been arranged. Hank hands over his gun and leaves his office, there's a deeply moving moment where Hank finally cries a little as his wife hugs him in the elevator. Excruciatingly, though, we still know that Tuco's cousins are coming to kill Hank to avenge Tuco's death. What happens when they corner him in the carpark is too exciting to paraphrase, but by the end of it, I had as close to an out-of-body experience as I've ever had during a work of fiction. "He's going to die!" my family and I wailed at each other as we watched, "he's actually going to die!" Only drama, rather than schlock or escapism, can hurt you like this.
Propaganda affects us all but it's always the show you least suspect. It is disturbing to realise how well that piece of propaganda worked on me. (It's unnerving to me, too, that my piece on The Wire singles out Prezbylewski as one of its greatest characters and specifically praises his arc). Perhaps there are similar reasons for why one of Line of Duty's dramatic high points - the death of Denton, with her trumphant final line "BECAUSE I'M A POLICE OFFICER!" also moved me. To acknowledge the show's propagandistic qualities - and my own political objections to them - is not, of course, to deny or resist its artistic qualities. Hank, like Denton, is a brilliantly written and acted character, and one I will continue to enjoy on rewatching, just as I will continue to to be moved by rewatching The Wire, Prezbylewski included. Unlike The Wire, Breaking Bad is as uninterested in exposing the duplicity of the "War on Drugs" as Jane Austen was in the Napoleonic Wars. So magnificently directed, written and acted, it remains an unsurpassable depiction and condemnation of the moral bankruptcy of the masculine ego, of the sentimentality and self-righteousness that often lie behind violence, and of the ironic failure of perpetrators of violence to truly understand or empathise with the people they're "doing this for," but at times its view of Mexicans and Chicanos doesn't feel vastly different from Donald Trump's. Better Call Saul, the excellent-but-not-as-good-as-Breaking-Bad-whatever-people-say prequel series, finally gives us a more nuanced Chicano character in Nacho, brilliantly played by Michael Mando, but it's a little too late, and Nacho's father, like Andrea in Breaking Bad, doesn't get enough screen time. There is, in fact, a devastating subplot in season 1 of Breaking Bad about Hugo Archuleta, the kindly Mexican janitor who offers a vomiting Walt a spliff to ease his cancer suffering and then gets blamed for Walt's thefts from the lab and busted by Hank. It acts as a powerful corrective to Hank's personal charm for the viewer: his lack of compassion for what's going to happen to Hugo when Walt inquires about it is harrowing to listen to. So much about the injustice of the absurd War on Drugs is said right there. Subsequently, this point gets lost and Hank is seen more as a moral counterpart to Walt. My political reservations about Line Of Duty similarly don't affect my high regard for it (well...for those first three series...) as drama, but there's always the possibility that the increasing number of cracks on its surface will shatter and another Bodyguard will be unleashed.
Then there's Line of Duty's use of violence and action. The murder of Georgia Trotman (Jessica Raine) at the end of the first episode of series two always felt like fridging to me: kill off the young, likeable, attractive, feisty woman we've just met for maximum shock value, and increase the poignancy by hinting at a romantic connection between her and the male lead. There's even a gratuitous detail about her brains having to be spooned back into her skull. The poignancy and the brutality in such a juxtaposition become a kind of pornography. I think what ultimately determines whether the death of a particular female character is fridging or a legitimate moment of drama is how relevant the death is: is it strongly present throughout much of the drama, its human cost truly examined, as with the death of Denton in series 3, the death of Jackie in series 1 (even though the fridge is literal on that occasion) and the deaths of Jane and Andrea in Breaking Bad, or is it something the writer and the viewer forget about once it has done its job, like the deaths of the women cursed with the secondary role in so many of the James Bond films? Maneet's death in series 5 also ends up falling into the second category. Its human cost is explored to start with, with a powerful performance from Maya Sondhi, but, as mentioned earlier, Arnott's and Fleming's lack of anger at Corbett for this vile act and the equally vile and drawn-out torture of Hastings's wife feel ridiculous, and Arnott bonds with Corbett's widow in series 6 while Maneet's young children and husband are forgotten.
Mark Fisher observed "a kind of machismo of demythologization" in the work of Frank Miller and James Ellroy:
They pose as unflinching observers who refuse to prettify the world so that it can be fitted into the supposedly simple ethical binaries of the superhero comic and the traditional crime novel. The 'realism' here is somehow underscored, rather than undercut, by their fixation on the luridly venal - even though the hyperbolic insistence on cruelty, betrayal and savagery in both writers quickly becomes pantomimic. 'In his pitch blackness' Mike Davis wrote of Ellroy in 1992, 'there is no light left to cast shadows and evil becomes a forensic banality. The result feels very much like the actual moral texture of the Reagan-Bush era: a supersaturation of corruption that fails any longer to outrage or even interest'.
Fisher has elsewhere described Ellroy as "a Hobbesian Conservative who evinces a macho pragmatism that accepts violence, exploitation and betrayal as inevitable." Similarly, Alan Bennett, writing about the 2009 Channel 4 TV adaptation of David Peace's Red Riding novels, suggested that:
though the police get away with extreme violence and even murder I find it hard to credit (if I understand the plot) that masked bobbies could shoot up a club or batter and rape a reporter on the Yorkshire Post without there being some sort of repercussions. [...] So while Red Riding seems like gritty realism it is in this respect quite romantic, as romantic and fanciful as the stories told at the other end of the social and geographical scale in Midsomer Murders. In Midsomer the murders average thee or four per episode but never seem to incur any comment in the press or ruffle the calm surface of the community. It takes more than the discovery of a mere body to stop the garden fete.
In fact, it's striking how much respected writing in the 21st century takes violence to ludicrous levels. Game of Thrones is widely seen as an adult rather than an adolescent TV programme, and Adam Roberts has written of the appeal of its gruesome blend of horrific violence and salacious sex, also seeing it as Hobbesian:
This solipsistic and eroticised quality is the logic of much of the grimdark and body-horror that plays such a prominent part of contemporary culture: Bret Easton Ellis's American Psycho (1991) or Tarantino's grisly set-pieces are Sadean exercises: apolitical and individualised, exercises in a reversionary solipsistic excess. So, despite its larger ensemble cast and pretentions towards realpolitik, is Game of Thrones: ‘Tits and Dragons’ as Ian McShane memorably called the show, after appearing on it (‘Peter Stringfellow's Lord of the Rings’ is Stewart Lee's pithy put-down). Here physical violence, lavishly illustrated on screen via distressingly lifelike special effects, combines wth a good deal of nudity and sexual activity to create a distinctly Sadean Fantasy flavour. [...]
This, it seems to me, doesn't critique the contemporary political turn to the right so much as translate it into the representational logic of fantastika. The one thing that unites today's Brexit agitators, and Trumps, and Viktor Orbáns, the basic Brexitrumpbán premise, is that the world is dark and full of horrors, and that the polity must pull up the drawbridge and arm the cannons in the face of these things. Hobbes is very much back in fashion nowadays. And TV SFF, the Game of Thrones and Westworld and True Blood and Altered Carbon vibe (something also true of recent rape-and-sandals hit epics like Spartacus and Rome) embroiders a fundamentally Sadean-Hobbesian world: nasty, brutish and sure-to-include-female-nudity.
Dennis Kelly's sometimes-good 2013-14 drama for Channel 4, Utopia, piled on a grotesque cavalcade of offensive scenes such as a baby trained to become a killer by being subjected to experiments by his own father to destroy his empathy in which rabbits were killed in front of him, until the child ended up killing rabbits himself, and a hitman (that baby grown up, in fact) walking into a school and shooting schoolchildren and teachers dead in order to frame a child for the shooting. Russell T Davies's woeful "adult" spin-off of Doctor Who, Torchwood, experienced acclaim for the first time with its third season, "Children of Earth", which ended with the protagonist brutally and bloodily murdering his young grandson in order to save the world. In the case of British TV it seems like a curious offshoot of the desire to push back against the vicious fundamentalism of Mary Whitehouse and the rightwing press: the more violent and viscerally unpleasant you make your script, the more you must be doing something right.
Cormac McCarthy's The Road is an unforgettable, profoundly moving novel, horrifying and invigorating, and yet it takes a while after you've read it to realise just how absurdly unlikely the violent details are. Somehow, in this case heightened by McCarthy's artistry, it convinces us that it's just the opposite: a hyper-realistic, unflinchingly honest vision of the near future, just one crisis away. Do we really think that after sudden worldwide nuclear disaster there will soon be armed gangs marching with "catamites" displayed in chains, people locked in cellars so that limbs can be taken from them for successive meals and babies roasted on spits? If not, why does the book frighten us? It's worth considering in this light the scene in series two of Line of Duty where Denton returns to work after a murderous attack that left three of her fellow officers dead. Her neck is in a surgical collar. Everyone seems to be sympathetic at first, but when she visits the toilet cubicle several of her colleagues burst in, force her head down the toilet, and blame her for the deaths of their fellow officers, as she chose to respond to the call without additional backup: "We should be burying you, you stupid bitch." All of her other colleagues have followed her tormentors into the bathroom, and are silent spectators. Everything about this screams gritty realism, but is this gritty realism actually realistic? How many police officers could really shove the head of a female fellow officer in a surgical collar down the toilet? How many could watch? And even if they could, would they really bother to put on such a convincing act of sympathy at first, then sneak into the bathroom after her and arrange themselves outside the toilet door as if they were organising a surprise party? In series four, Ifield suspects Huntley, then after accidentally knocking her out it's oddly Ifield that goes nuts, then while Huntley is trying to survive the fallout from this her arm gets infected from their fight and has to be amputated. Series 3 opens with Danny Waldron, an armed response officer, being shown the photo ID of a suspect he and his team must race to stop before he carries out a gangland execution only for Danny to recognise him as one of the men who sexually abused him years ago. Perhaps Line of Duty is best understood as operating within the logic of a nightmare. Guest protagonists - Gates, Denton, Waldron, Huntley - are trapped in personal nightmares, in a Gothic version of our world. Often the unrelated horrors they face pile on top of each other in a way they obviously wouldn't in real life. It's similar in technique to Jimmy McGovern's magnificent series Cracker, which was profoundly in tune with the politics and undercurrents of its age in a way that put so many literary novels of the time - and since - to shame, yet somehow achieved this with a protagonist as impossible as Sherlock Holmes was and a world in which we meet four police officers who work together, two of whom get murdered, a third raped by the fourth and then the fourth commits a murder-suicide within 2 years (the first two murders and the rape occurring as a result of three unrelated cases). We've all heard the weak joke about the murder rate in Oxford according to Inspector Morse. Shows like Line of Duty and Cracker combine that approach with a more intelligent and unflinching engagement with the world's horrors, but in the later seasons it becomes harder to see what Line of Duty is trying to say.
And yet... in the age of Trump, Weinstein and Savile, the murder of George Floyd and the acquittal of Kyle Rittenhouse and George Zimmerman, and so many other cases that we need to open our eyes to, I'm wary of the remaining traces of my own "surely that wouldn't happen" squeamishness. How could Savile have been given his own keys to a hospital? How could Edwina Currie, the minister responsible, remain so smugly unrepentant, insisting that if she'd known "I'd have said "the keys Jimmy." More recently she's appeared on our TV screens to defend the Government's handling of the covid19 crisis. How could Cressida Dick become Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police Force after heading the operation responsible for shooting Jean Charles de Menezes dead? How is the former Director of Public Prosecutions who could find no grounds for action in the killing of de Menezes and Ian Tomlinson when he was still in the job in 2009 and 2010 now the Knighted leader of the Labour Party? How could he have whipped the party to abstain a bill that allows public bodies to authorise rape, murder and torture? How can Kyle Rittenhouse be standing there behind the judge in those extraordinary photographs, and how can the judge request that the men he killed not be referred to as "victims" but could be referred to as "looters" and "arsonists"? How can police officers attack women protesting a vigil for a woman murdered by a police officer? When one reads about the women raped by undercover officers or sees the footage of police officers calmly chatting and exchanging misogynistic quips about Dr Konstancja Duff, the innocent woman they've just brutally stripsearched, or sees what the officers at the Sarah Everard vigil were prepared to do even in front of cameras, one wonders: is the real problem that I'm not allowing myself to face the fact that police officers would indeed shove the head of a woman in a surgical collar down the toilet? Perhaps life is as brutal as the "gritty" school of drama. There's a line in the Cracker story "Men Should Weep" in which a woman who has been raped is answering police forensic questions and her male questioner comments "so much easier when the victim is educated." First watching that some time ago, I honestly remember thinking that line was overdone. Surely no-one would be that crass? Covid 19 even has me wondering if that Torchwood story wasn't so far off the mark after all: we've seen both Tories and Labour prioritise putting children back in school over the deaths this will cause, which immediately brought to mind "Children of Earth"'s scenes of politicians calmly discussing which children could be sacrificed and how many of them. There is a need for writers to make us gasp and shudder, to make us think "surely not?", to take us past our comfort zone so that we start to realise that more horrible things are possible and already happening than we like to think about. I just think that, creatively, Mercurio, for all of the gruesomeness on display in is scripts, is just not always fucking pushing himself. His bad guys become no different to the baddies in Dirty Harry and Robocop films. As the UK gets uglier and uglier, Mercurio's work seems less an interrogation of it and more like a jaded capitulation to it. At its best - and three great seasons is a fine achievement, no matter what came next - it shows us what TV drama is capable of as an artform, and what a tough thriller can really do, up there with Edge of Darkness, Cracker, Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, Breaking Bad, Happy Valley and The Wire. At its worst it feels like very violent Tory propaganda. Watch those kids on the estate. Don't trust the Muslim wives. Still...wonder if Hastings will turn out to be H after all, eh?
