It’s a set-piece, sarge. Through the tunnels of London. Scottish bloke on the walkie-talkie. Code words. ETAs. Vicky McClure. You know where you are with Vicky McClure. Short back and sides, no messing around. Classic haircut for a reason. Yeah she’ll have a topknot with it, why not. You wanna say something? Me and all the boys can’t hear you. You wanna say something? About Vicky McClure’s topknot? Thought not.
Council block, sarge. Road block. I’ll give you the rundown on Trigger Point (starting Sunday): ITV has overspent on getting the two main actors in, so everyone around them just isn’t quite as good. Adrian Lester’s here, look. Good bloke. Family bloke. Complicated handshake. All right, enough fannying around, yeah? Suit up. We’ve got a bomb to dispose of.
The thing with Line of Duty is that it’s Line of Duty, and we’re not here to make Line of Duty. But the lads out here like gritty police procedurals with a bit of Enigma machine-style codebreaking, don’t they? They’ve got the taste for it, and Jed Mercurio’s got the secret sauce. All right, fine, he didn’t write this one. Someone else did, jog on. But it’s his production company, so he’s the one who’ll go on Twitter if you don’t like it. Write that down.
Upstairs, third on the left, copy. We’re on the cusp of a new era here, sarge. You know what I mean when I say “Scandi drama”: a police officer in an elegant overcoat is going to drive out beyond some fjords and say nowt. And you know what I mean when the murder is a “legacy drama” set in “the USA”, an all: one girl’s dead, nothing’s as it seems, everyone in town seems to have had some sort of interaction with her or her suspiciously grumpy dad. Back in the day, British detective shows were all twee little villages or that magician bloke. Not any more, yeah? We’re the best in the world at driving a 4x4 out to an abandoned factory building and telling everyone to GET OUT! THIS IS YOUR LAST WARNING! I AM A POLICE OFFICER AND I WILL FIRE!
Twists? Yeah, we’ve got twists, sarge. And we’ve got turns. We’ve got some pretty bananas set pieces, too. Entire first episode is set in the same block of flats, as Vicky McClure and Adrian Lester alternate between disarming bombs and doing banter. Is it your turn to buy chips or not? Private joke. You wouldn’t get it. But we get it. This job is everything to us. It’s not a career, yeah? It’s a calling. You’ve got my back and I’ve got yours. Now chill and take five, I’ve got a car door to open in a really high-tension way.
Sort of show that teaches you lingo, boss. IED. Hard cover. Forty-five minutes of this and you’ll be fairly confident you can disarm a nail bomb using a steady hand and some snips. Sorry, slipped into force-chat: civs call them “wire cutters”, I think. Wouldn’t know. It’s been a long time since I did anything civilian. I don’t eat lunch, for instance; I just have a big energy drink while leaning on the back of my car. I use lockers as a storage device more than any other adult alive. And don’t even ask me about grit. Can’t move for grit. They’ve got Kevin Eldon doing a northern accent, that’s how gritty it is.
Gotta go, boss: I’ve accidentally toppled the series of dominos that will aim a rightwing pro-England political party at the real and dreadful threat of Isis, and in setting an ITV show in the middle of that geopolitical discourse I’ve started off a whole big round of blogging. One last thing before I go: these lurching police dramas might lean on cliffhangers too heavily, yeah, but they do make you sit up and gasp. Nothing wrong with that.
And here’s the thing, right: you can’t gasp at drama if you don’t think the stakes are real. Vicky McClure’s sweating her topknot off here in front of a wired-up boiler and due to the density of the world around her – you feel the hard lessons these people have gone through; you feel the roughness of certain working relationships and the smoothness of others; there’s guile, and a certain British griminess, and all of it is laid thick like a fog – and if all that wasn’t there, I wouldn’t give a shit if she blew up or not, sarge. But it is, so I’m enraptured, and I’m taking notes, and I’m pretty sure if you turn one of these codes sideways the whole thing reveals itself. Keep it under your hat, yeah. See ya, sarge. I’m just off to disarm a vest-bomb with maverick elan.
