Tony Schumacher spent 11 years as a night patrol officer in Merseyside, with spit in his face and blood on his boots, responding to emergency calls. Night after hellish night, he worked the job that ended up giving him a nervous breakdown and PTSD. He’s described the experience as “like some long LSD trip”. Some shifts he’d be picking up dead bodies, others he’d be called to a pub because a llama was running amok. He took all the carnage, trauma and humour and packed it into The Responder, one of the rawest BBC dramas in recent memory.
Martin Freeman played Chris Carson, a constable about to disappear down a hole towards certain collapse, possibly death. He talked freely to his counsellor about being on the brink of hurting himself and his beloved daughter and partner. Within minutes, we had watched him threaten to kill a particularly peevesome member of the public who hates his neighbour’s dog and calls the police incessantly about it. “You’re disappearing these last few months,” said his put-upon wife, Kate, who’d been driven back into the arms of Ray, a cop who shopped Chris in for supposed corruption and got him demoted.
