Some TV shows have such deliciously punny titles that you wonder which came first: the name or the premise. The IT Crowd, for example, or Transparent. And BBC One’s latest half-hour sitcom is no different. Dom (Gbemisola Ikumelo) and Kay (Hammed Animashaun) are inexperienced and ambivalent Black British PCSOs (the tier below the actual police; “the s*** police”, in the show’s words) recruited to an unauthorised undercover mission within a notorious drug gang. This is the set-up of Black Ops, an unruly new comedy about low-level players marooned in a secret operation.
Historians of the 1990s and of covert military practices will take pleasure in the excellently named DS Clinton Blair (Ariyon Bakare), progenitor of this confidential programme, described by Dom as a “budget Idris”. Responding to the perceived racism of his superiors – they consistently provide him with white officers for undercover missions on Black estates – Blair recruits confident but insubordinate Dom and her buffoonish pal Kay (“about as much use as a chocolate teapot!”) for the infiltration. “This all seems like a lot of trouble to go to for a few drug arrests on an estate,” Dom observes, shrewdly, but she accepts all the same. A short montage later, Dom and Kay are lurking on the corner of a London estate, trying to sell heroin to passing addicts. They are joined through the series by actors including co-creator Akemnji Ndifornyen (as menacing drug lord Tevin), and British TV regulars such as Joanna Scanlan, Felicity Montagu, and Zoë Wanamaker.
