wed 02/04/2025

police

Good Cop, BBC One

A sense of déjà vu strikes from the very first shot. It is a dark and stormy night. A lone man staggers down an empty street through the lashing rain. Once indoors we see he has blood on his hands. A minute has not yet passed but Warren Brown – for...

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Good Cop: From Page to Screen

On Thursday the BBC will screen the opening episode of the television drama Good Cop. I finished writing it back in August 2010, and on the strength of that story and ideas for a total of four episodes, the series was green-lit in February 2011. We...

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Vexed, Series 2, BBC Two

It’s not usually a good sign when the second series takes two years to materialise. Vexed , a comedy drama with corpses, took its first bow a couple of years ago. It offered Toby Stephens as DI Jack Armstrong, a detective from the old school who’s...

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Line of Duty, Series Finale, BBC Two

At the end of episode four, we left ferret-faced copper Steve Arnott (Martin Compston) seemingly having his fingers hacked off with a bolt-cutter by a gang of hooded thugs and their poisonous little child-sidekick, Ryan. Boringly, the glum and...

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Line of Duty, BBC Two

Those quaint old TV shows in which we were invited to support and admire the police unreservedly have long been overtaken by real-life events. Now evolution has brought us to Line of Duty, a series that presents the police as a failing bureaucracy...

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The Raid

If action speaks louder than words, then The Raid is positively deafening. The third feature from Welshman Gareth Evans is ingeniously, almost absurdly exciting - for the most part it’s shorn of story and propelled not by plot but by peril. That it’...

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Interview: Braquo and A Prophet screenwriter Abdel Raouf Dafri

Explaining the difference between the first series of the uncompromising French policier Braquo and the second, which he has come on board to write, Abdel Raouf Dafri says his take is “even more violent, even more sarcastic. The line between the...

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Silent Witness, BBC One/ Once Upon a Time, Channel 5/ The Voice, BBC One

It must have been a toss-up for the BBC whether to scrap Waking the Dead or Silent Witness, but evidently the latter won the race against extinction by a putrefying nose, probably attached to a hideously-charred corpse which may or may not have been...

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Scott & Bailey, Series 2, ITV1

There are any number of television detective shows and to differentiate themselves they all need a USP. The excellent Sherlock is a very knowing modern reworking of the original, Life on Mars was set in a time warp, Dirk Gently uses weird global...

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Once Upon a Time in Anatolia

A police procedural played out over a long dark night of the soul, Once Upon a Time in Anatolia is the magnificent sixth feature from Turkish writer / director Nuri Bilge Ceylan (Three Monkeys, Uzak). So much more than a simple thriller, it...

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Jeremy Deller: Joy in People, Hayward Gallery

As he readily acknowledges himself, Jeremy Deller can’t paint and he can’t draw, so he never went to art school. For many artists of his generation (he’s 46), this lack of traditionally based skills seems not to have presented a problem. But Deller...

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Rampart

A bent cop movie with style, swagger and a sometimes questionable approach to characterisation, Oren Moverman’s latest at least gifts Woody Harrelson one of his best roles in years. Set against a backdrop of the Rampart police scandals of the late...

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