police
Adam Sweeting
Any show making its debut in the midst of Wimbledon and the Euro-football, plus a spectacular performance by Lewis Hamilton at Silverstone, is likely to be gasping for air, and BBC Two’s ditzy new cop series didn’t so much charge out of the blocks as trip over them. Masterminded by Ben Schiffer, the eight-part series is based on Barbara Nadel’s Inspector Ikmen novels, which are much loved by their readers.I wouldn’t bet on them feeling the same about the TV version. The plot-driving device is the arrival in Istanbul of Detective Mehmet Suleyman (Ethan Kai from Killing Eve), who finds himself Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Lucie Shorthouse is enjoying some high-profile TV action with her roles in Channel 4’s We Are Lady Parts, about the adventures of an all-woman Muslim punk band, and in BBC One’s reincarnated Rebus. In the former, she plays the band’s niqab-clad manager Momtaz, while the latter casts her as rookie cop DC Siobhan Clarke, trying to cope with the maverick behaviour of the titular John Rebus, played by Richard Rankin. Both shows have enjoyed a surge of critical acclaim and have pulled healthy audiences, which must surely have got the phones ringing in the office of Shorthouse’s agent. And that’s Read more ...
Graham Fuller
Forty years later, they have haggard faces, grey hair if any, and sorrowful expressions tinged with incredulity at the outrages perpetrated against them. At one point, the burliest of them cries. One who struggled with drink and drugs says four of his colleagues committed suicide.To different degrees these British men, interviewees in the latest documentary by Hillsborough director Daniel Gordon, are suffering from PTSD. Most were born into the generation that fought in the Falklands War – one, in fact, served in Northern Ireland. It’s not as ex-servicemen that they tell their stories to the Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
The previous incarnation of Ian Rankin’s Scottish detective on ITV starred, in their contrasting styles, John Hannah and Ken Stott. For this Rebus redux, arriving nearly 25 years after the original first series began, screenwriter Gregory Burke has reworked the character as a younger Detective Sergeant, drawing on the spirit of Rankin’s original novels but with the author’s blessing to take the character somewhere new.Richard Rankin (no relation to the writer) is an excellent choice for Rebus. Rough, tough, scruffy and not to be trusted around a bottle of whisky, he comes equipped with the Read more ...
Helen Hawkins
The first season of Blue Nights was so close to police procedural perfection, it would be hard for season two to reach the same heights. Overall, it doesn’t, though there are still special moments.After an exhilarating start, its multiple narrative strands thrash around like eels in a tank. We are back at the response unit in the old Belfast nick, though with a new recruit and a couple of old faces unexpectedly returning. [Spoiler alert for those who didn’t watch season one and ought to.] But the tightness of the writers’ grip has slackened.It’s a year on, and the rookie cops have bedded in. Read more ...
Gary Naylor
Detective Chief Inspector Othello leads a quasi-paramilitary team of Metropolitan Police officers investigating gang activity in Docklands. With a chequered past now behind him, he has reformed and has the respect of both the team he leads and his superior officers. But his secret marriage to Commander Brabantio’s daughter, Desdemona, unleashes a stream of racist invective from her father, triggering memories of abuse that are never far from the surface. Meanwhile his Detective Sergeant, Iago, lurks in the shadows, plotting revenge for his slight in being overlooked for promotion. Ola Ince’s Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
It’s not easy to find a new way to package a drama about that perennially popular topic, the dark side of policing, but Criminal Record at least gets its ducks in a row with some strong writing by Paul Rutman and a strength-in-depth cast. Peter Capaldi (pictured below) is in chilling form as the Hackney-based DCI Daniel Hegarty, a veteran detective who evidently knows where a lot of bodies are buried. When he starts getting inquiries about a decade-old murder case from the comparatively junior DS June Lenker (Cush Jumbo), it looks like a mild irritation he can merely brush off.Naturally that Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
The original title of this French crime drama was Pax Massilia, a reference to the classical roots of its setting in what is now known as Marseille. Dating back to the 6th Century BC, it’s supposedly the oldest city in France. An atmospheric mix of architectural styles, dramatic views, a Mediterranean climate and multiple ethnicities, it makes the perfect stage for this fast-paced and sometimes horrifically violent thriller.It’s directed by Olivier Marchal, an ex-cop whose CV includes Braquo and 36 Quai des Orfèvres. And while the eternal struggle between police and thieves is hardly the most Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
The question they’re all asking is, can Shetland survive the loss of Douglas Henshall as DI Jimmy Perez? After all, it was Henshall’s shrewd and quietly anguished performance which gave the show much of its allure. And now there’s no Mark Bonnar either, who could always be relied on to add a soupçon of angst.Instead, it’s Ashley Jensen (Agatha Raisin, After Life etc) who’s front and centre in the new, revamped Shetland. She plays DI Ruth Calder of the Metropolitan Police, investigating the murder of a London gangster, Philip Remis. She’s looking for a runaway witness to the crime, Ellen Read more ...
Gary Naylor
The day after I saw the show, as went about the mundanities of domestic life, I wondered how long it would take to come across a reference to 1984. My best bet was listening to an LBC phone-in concerning next week’s conference at Bletchley Park on Artificial Intelligence, but the advertising break intervened, so I switched to Times Radio. Sure enough, at 12.11pm in a report on an apology issued by the Cabinet Office to journalist, Julia Hartley-Brewer, Big Brother Watch was mentioned as the organisation that animated the complaint. It was not felt necessary to explain much about its purpose Read more ...
Gary Naylor
A flea bites a rat which spooks a horse which kicks a man and… an empire falls?James Fritz has won writing awards already in his developing career, but he has set himself quite the challenge to weave a thread that can bear that narrative weight. Two and a half hours later in this retelling of the late 19th-century Cleveland Street scandal, the empire survives, the fall guy takes the inevitable tumble and we’re a little punchdrunk. Here is a play that beats you up with its sheer volume of artistic choices but also dips into stretches of unnecessary exposition that drain energy away: there’s a Read more ...
Gary Naylor
The Royal Court’s collaboration with Access All Areas (AAA) may not be theatre’s first explicit embrace of the neurodiverse community on stage: Chickenshed has five decades of extraordinary inclusive work behind them and Jellyfish, starring Sarah Gordy at the National Theatre, was one of my highlights of 2019.But Molly Davies's play, directed by Hamish Pirie, may be the most ambitious. Developed by AAA’s seven learning disabled and autistic Associate Artists, the five-year long project addresses many issues but sinks into a convoluted narrative that never quite resolves itself into plain Read more ...