TV COPS: 'WPC 56' and 'The Line of Duty'

 COPS ON THE BOX 

Internal affairs: Dunbar, Compston and McClure. (Image: BBC)

BBC TV has delivered two on-form police dramas based around female officers - WPC 56 and The Line of Duty. Here's why they're worthy of your time.

I'm happy to report that the British TV police drama is, if not in completely rude health, polishing its buttons and cutting a dash again on the streets. By police drama, I mean shows that are about the demands and contradictions of police work, rather than the gloomy psyche of the title protagonist (I’m looking at you, DCI Banks and Inspector George Gently).

"Make us a cup of tea, luv." (Image: BBC)

What’s most surprising is that one of these returns to form hails from the middle of a weekday afternoon, with none of the quick, get-on-with-it-because-we’re-on-a-shoestring-budget feel you sometimes get from midday TV drama. And WPC 56, set in the 1950s and starring Jennie Jacques as the tough but put upon WPC Gina Dawson, is anything but bland. The second series, which finished last week, dealt with sexual harassment, prostitution, conmen and repressed homosexuality, content that would, perhaps, have been more at home after the watershed than in the same cuddly zone as Pointless. I have to say that I thought the assault of Dawson, by the sexually predatory Assistant Chief Constable Arthur Coulson (John Bowler), was rather too strong for 2 in the afternoon.

Otherwise, WPC 56 is an afternoon delight. The characters live in a 1950s pleasingly fashioned from film noir movies, all high and extreme-angled camera shots, murkily lit interiors and a dark clubland that wouldn’t shame Kiss Me Deadly. A lot of thought has gone into the historical context of the series, as in contrast to the proactive Dawson, the women characters are often portrayed as victims or helplessly reliant on men, while Dawson, an empowered young woman – significantly, she's allowed to have sex out of wedlock – struggles against sexism and prejudice.(The only thing slightly wrong with the period tone is that no one smokes at all.)

The plotting is rewardingly sophisticated for an afternoon series and WPC 56 isn’t afraid to be downbeat either. As the second run ended, even though she’s seen off Coulson, there was a shadow over Dawson's future in the force because of an investigation into a shooting she was involved in. I’ll go as far as to say that the series is far too good to languish where it is, so here's a suggestion: swap WPC 56 with the antiseptic and annoyingly sentimental Call the Midwife. Dawson and co. would be good for Sunday nights, as WPC 56 is Heartbeat with a scar down its cheek and a flick-knife hidden behind its back.

Between the lines

Curiously, the other the police series the BBC are fielding at the moment, the second series of The Line of Duty, is also built around a female police officer. In what’s shaping up to be a career best performance, Keeley Hawes plays Detective Inspector Lindsay Denton, accused of complicity in the deaths of a witness and several police officers. AC12, the police's internal investigation unit looking into her case, is peopled by the same fine actors as it was in the first series, namely Adrian Dunbar, Vicky McClure and Martin Compston.

Jack or knave? (Image: BBC)

The most enthralling aspect of The Line of Duty are the interrogation scenes where Denton faces off against AC12. They sing with tension and authenticity thanks to writer Jed Mercurio’s evident research. Wednesday's second episode featured a great confrontation near the end, as Denton called into the question her interrogators’ integrity because of debt, inappropriate relations with a witness and compromising texts, a scene that was possible because of Mercurio's creative diligence.

The Line of Duty began with a show-stopping stunt. Played by Call the Midwife’s Jessica Raine, DC Georgia Trotman looked as if she was going to be a major character, but was killed off at the end of the first episode. It was an impressive shock, but the series doesn't really need gimmicks like that: it's astute writing, committed performances and edgy directorial vocabulary, using jittery camera shots and crash zooms, are more than enough to make you watch, particularly as the theme of the programme is so compulsive – flawed, professional people doing an extremely hard job.

I can’t wait to see how this second series pans out. As Denton said, “People have underestimated me my whole life,” so it’ll be fascinating to see if the woman with the face of a disappointed angel has simply been unlucky or has, in fact, been bought off. I have to say it again: I really haven't seen Hawes as good as she is here in anything else. She gives a remarkable, understated, underplayed performance lit with shocking flashes of violence.

Well done, BBC. The black and blue lamp is in good hands.

 

TV COMEDY: 'Outnumbered' and 'Inside No.9', BBC, 6 February

THE DARK STUFF 
From Hancock to The Thick of It, British comedy hs excelled at making us laugh at the darkness lurking just below the civilised veneer of British life. Outnumbered and the brilliant Inside No.9 continue this fine (and disturbing) tradition.

No. 9: quality black comedy with a quality cast. (Image: BBC)

Outnumbered: a sitcom with the never-fails-to-be-funny gimmick of a bunch of endearing dysfunctional kids – moody Karen (Ramona Marquez), jovial Ben (Daniel Roche) and I’m-more-grown-up-than-you-are Jake (the unlikely named Tyger Drew-Honey) – getting the better of their equally dysfunctional parents Pete Brockman (a constantly bewildered Hugh Dennis) and Sue (Claire Skinner, seemingly always a hair’s breadth from a nervous breakdown). The random, surrealist dialogue and physical comedy that the child actors improvised when they were younger was often inspired as well as being laugh-out-loud funny, so with the kids now teenagers, I wondered if the show would still work as well. The good news is that it does, with a mature, darker slant to Andy Hamilton and Guy Jenkin’s writing.

The one-liner strike-rate of Outnumbered hasn’t been compromised, with a classic, witty and quotable slice of dialogue being delivered roughly every thirty seconds:

Pete: (on Jake's driving lesson): At one point I yelled ‘pedestrian!’ and he thought it was a criticism.

Sue: Ben, I’ve told you before: no gladiator nets at the dinner table.

and many more.

The battling Brockmans (Image: BBC)

What’s more prominent than ever is the theme of exasperation, exhaustion and paranoia regarding modern British family life. Sue tried to get her children and husband sitting at the dinner table in a bid to counteract her family becoming increasingly ‘fragmented and anti-social’, only to look up and find none of them talking to each other and all of them texting. Obsessed with Sigmund Freud, Ben made Sue question her parenting abilities and worry about the effect her own shortcomings had on her children. Over at the local swimming gala, the aggressively competitive Karen threw her medal for coming third into a bin, demanded a drugs test on the other competitors and flounced out of the relay team. Pete, meanwhile, tried to convince a worried parent and the pool security man that he wasn’t a paedophile, even though he was filming Karen’s race on his phone.

The playing by the gifted line-up of actors, adult and adolescent, is as sprightly, engaging and as hilarious as ever. It’ll be fascinating to see how they interact with Outnumbered’s new theme of regret and sadness at the state of contemporary family life, summed up as Sue sat alone at the dinner table and imagined her children giving her compliments for cooking such a nice meal – compliments she knew she was never going to get for real.

Tales of the very unexpected 

Half an hour after Outnumbered, on BBC2 at 10pm, ‘masters of horrorcom’ Steve Pemberton and Reece Shearsmith, late of Psychoville – ‘Mr Jelly and His Box of Hands’ – and the genre-busting The League of Gentlemen – ‘Are you local?’ – were back with a new anthology series Inside No.9. I’d seen Mr Shearsmith on Wednesday morning’s Breakfast Time and been impressed by his comments about his new series: like me, he regretted the passing of shows like Armchair Theatre and Play for Today, where there was a different story every week, and the well-remembered Tales of the Unexpected, in which a horror story would follow a crime story would follow a comedy and so on. The pitch – different stories that took place behind a door with a 9 on it – and the finished product has clearly impressed the BBC, as a second series has already been commissioned.

Two funny men in a very funny wardrobe.
(Image:BBC)

It’s easy to see why. The first tale, ‘Sardines’, was innovative, original, chilling and revisited Pemberton and Shearsmith's favourite landscape, where dark secrets hide behind the closed doors of an apparently serene middle England. This was quite literally the case, as approximately one third of all Britain’s character acting talent – Katherine Parkinson, Sheaarsmith and Pemberton themselves, Anne Reid, Julian Rhind-Tutt, Timothy West and Anna Chancellor, among others – were shut in a wardrobe in a game of sardines, while the consequences of jealousy, incest, repressed desire, child abuse and various dysfunctional relationships seethed around and through their characters.

‘Sardines’ was an immaculate piece of plotting, too, as the various quirks of the characters – body odour, intimacy issues, low self-esteem, bullying – gradually all connected and led up to the stunning closing scene, which more than equalled the signature final twists of Tales of the Unexpected. In short, ‘Sardines’ was a delight: deceptively simple, blackly funny, grotesque and hugely entertaining.

Although most of the money must have gone on the cast, ‘Sardines’ was notable for the innovative budget saving of filming in one room. One brilliant shot focused on the empty bedroom for nearly a minute, as characters hiding under the bed and in the wardrobe bitched at each other. Like the whole story, it was a brilliant and inspired piece of comic staging.

Inside No.9 and Outnumbered may mine the dark seam in British life, but if the comedy that results is as good as what was on offer on Wednesday night, as far as I’m concerned they can keep digging. Expect, though, to suddenly find yourself questioning just why you’re laughing...

HISTORICAL DRAMA: The Musketeers, Deadwood

HISTORY LESSONS 
The Musketeers and Deadwood are examples of two modern approaches to historical TV drama: the Past is Really the Same and the Present, and a roll in the gutter of authentic, sordid period detail.

All for one and one for all? (Image: BBC)

I like historical drama. That is, drama that reflects the concerns of its period through the way the way the characters speak and relate. Give it a few years and Breaking Bad will be classified as historical drama, as it deals with economic pressure, and the promise of easy money through drugs, on a flawed, early 21st century everyman.

One way TV networks try and win viewers over to stories set in the distant past is by pretending that The Past Is Just The Same as The Present but with frilly shirts, horses and – the double slam dunk – sex and violence. The latest example of this curious approach (following on from The Tudors, Rome, Robin Hood and The White Queen) is the saturation-advertised The Musketeers, another version of Alexandre Dumas’s 17th century-set novel about French King Louis XIII’s personal regiment, this time devised by Adrian Hodges, whose previous main claim to fame was the Saturday afternoon dinosaur romp Primeval.

Looking at Hodges’ previous family serial credentials, there doesn’t seem to be any good reason why, some impressive action sequences and occasional bloody violence aside, The Musketeers should be on at 9pm on BBC1. Chaste feminine interest is divided between the Good, a very young looking Queen Anne (Alexandra Dowling) and the Bad, Cardinal Richelieu’s agent Milady (Maime McCoy), and the Decorative, d’Artagnan's sometime, put-upon paramour Constance (Tamal Kari). The Musketeers themselves, with the exception of d’Artagnan, don't come across as separate characters, rather a boisterous three-man mix of ladies’ man and the sort of testerone-fuelled hellraiser who'll get into a fight at the drop of a rapier (or a one-liner). So far, so similar to any previous version of the The Musketeers you might have seen, with the exception of Peter Capaldi's Cardinal Richlieu, who clearly belongs in a much better series.

The second episode, ‘Sleight of Hand’, was standard stuff and its plot and dialogue could have worked in any family action series, contemporary or otherwise, with little alteration: a plot to kill the disturbing boy-King Louis (Ryan Gage) was really a ruse by crook Vadim (Jason Flemyng, splendid as ever) to steal the king’s wealth, and the story had no more depth than that. The same could be said of last night’s slavery episode ‘Commodities’, although the storytelling stepped up a gear as Richlieu began to flex his dirty political muscles and the whole thing was smartly and artily directed by Saul Metzstein. It has to be said, though, that the decision to use English accents is disorientating; ranging from Shakesperean (Richelieu) to South London tower block (Porthos), you have a France located somewhere on the Thames Estuary.

Sadly, I can’t see this flimsy pseudo-history being enough to keep an after-the-watershed audience entertained for ten weeks. Unless it improves radically with gritty politics and historical intrigue, The Musketeers doesn’t offer enough in terms of novelty or entertainment to justify either the big budget that’s clearly been spent on it, or its promotion as a flagship BBC evening drama series. For all its adult pretensions, you get the feeling everyone involved would be happier being hale and hearty at 5pm on a Sunday afternoon on a third of the lavish budget.

Dead Good

The wild bunch... the male cast of Deadwood. (Image: HBO)

The opposite extreme of The Musketeers’ The Past Is Just The Same as The Present approach is Deadwood (originally shown between 2004 and 2006), HBO’s series about America’s last lawless town during the gold rush in 1867. The series caused a lot of controversy first time around due to the modern, unrestrained profanity in its dialogue, but the production team’s argument that this was a necessary concession for a contemporary audience was the only example of HBO compromising in its commitment to making Deadwood authentic. This extended to the series’ vibrant melting pot of different cultures – American, English, Irish, Chinese, German, Austrian and Russian – and the warts-and-all portrayal of frontier life and real historical figures: for instance, ‘Wild Bill’ Hicock (Keith Carradine) is shown as as a world weary gambler and 'Calamity' Jane Cannery as an alcoholic (Robin Weigert in a performance that’s as far away from Doris Day as it's possible to get.)

I’ve been laid low with flu over the past week or so, and when you've got a good chunk of time where you’re unable to do very much it’s the ideal moment to become absorbed in Deadwood's murky, labyrinthine world. Unlike the thin 17th century France of The Musketeers, as the series progresses you just keep going deeper into HBO’s lawless West. From the flawed Hicock and Jane, the revisionism continues in the anti-Western style of no set-piece gunfights, a lack of panoramic landscapes and an obsession with shady commerce. Deadwood is an enclosed, claustrophobic world, symbolised by a muddy, overcrowded thoroughfare between the camp's makeshift buildings and by most of the dubious decisions governing the residents and businesses being made behind closed doors in gloomy rooms. On top of the politicking over who controls what and who’s scamming who, there are the period-specific attitudes towards sex, race, illness, religion, money and easy violence, intricately laced through each of the characters. (Interestingly, from the very beginning young children equate with innocence in Deadwood, a theme that carries through to the establishing of the school house in the third series).

Al Swearengen: not about to sing 'Avalon' any time soon.
(Image: HBO)

And what characters. Until Breaking Bad came along, from its top stars to the lowest rung of its supporting cast Deadwood offered the best line up of acting talent on American television: then-newcomers like Timothy Olyphant (upright, short-tempered sheriff Seth Bollock) and Molly Parker (rich widow Alma Garrett) through seasoned A-listers like Powers Boothe (misogynistic saloon owner Cy Tolliver), Brad Dourif (the cantankerous ‘Doc’ Cochrane) and William Sanderson (shabby, eternally compromised hotelier E. B. Farnum), to scene-stealing character actors Geri Jewell and Ralph Richeson (the comedy servants Jewel and Richardson). The biggest revelation of all, though, was Brit Ian McShane, previously best known for his curly-haired 1980s rogue Lovejoy and a dodgy cover of ‘Avalon’. His wolfish publican Al Swearengen - another real life inhabitant of Deadwood – symbolises the corruption and amorality of the whole town in a mesmerising performance of coarse, Machiavellian, blackly funny virtuosity, as he manoeuevres one resident against another. Who'd have thought he had such a role in him? It’s certainly a long way for McShane way from Essex, where Lovejoy was largely filmed, but then, like all the best historical drama, Deadwood takes you from the familiar to a totally different place.

And that brings us back to The Musketeers. The BBC's latest attempt at period intrigue might attract actors of the calibre of Peter Capaldi, Hugo Speer and Jason Flemyng, but if they’re not inspired by the material, how can the programme’s makers expect the audience to be? (At least Call the Midwife, shown an hour before and irredeemably twee though it might be, has strong roles for female actors and engages with the social mores of its era). Producers don’t have to go for the full-on Profanisaurus approach of Deadwood, either: they just have to fully believe in the potential of a historical setting and trust the audience to believe in it too.

OK, on a bad day that might get you the soap-opera-with-vintage-frocks of Mr Selfridge, but it's also how great TV gets made. One Deadwood or Ripper Street is worth a hundred Musketeers.