Trust no one. Line Of Duty is back!

Picture: BBC

It’s the morning after the night before, when AC-12 - Ted Hastings, Kate Fleming and Steve Arnott, Britain’s favourite trio of coppers-investigating-bent-coppers - returned to our screens with the sixth series of Line Of Duty. For the most part, we weren’t disappointed (we being the 9.69 million viewers who tuned in - a whopping 44.5% of those watching telly between 9 and 10pm).

There was something of a slow-burn feel to the opener, a hallmark of both Breaking Bad and its spinoff Better Call Saul, lulling some critics into thinking it was off-par. It wasn't, but with seven episodes to fill in the series (rather than the usual six), creator Jed Mercurio appeared to be using the extra length to plant an array of seeds, with no idea of which might grow out and when. This is his gift - a panoply of potential plotlines with which to tease and antagonise. 

So, we were introduced to the season’s is-she/isn’t-she baddie, Kelly Macdonald’s DCI Joanne Davidson (billed in pre-publicity as “the most enigmatic adversary AC-12 has ever faced”). Like the previous is-she/isn't-she leads, DIs Lindsay Denton and Roz Huntley, Davidson is a mass of smouldering issues - a failing same sex relationship with a junior officer, paranoia, judging by the numerous heavy-duty locks on her front door, and potentially a link to a murdered journalist. Add to that, Hastings having to play things low-key after his final warning at the end of Series 5, Fleming’s home life in, apparently, tatters, and a bored Steve Arnott popping more Nurofen than is good for him as he continues to deal with being thrown down three flights of stairs in Series 4 by Balaclava Man. Oh, and an absolute blizzard of dizzying new acronyms, such as “We can keep it on the DL only if we have a CHIS on the MIT”, which may have been lifted directly from a Snoop Dogg lyric. “CHIS”, we were relieved to later learn on social media, means 'Covert Human Intelligence Source'. All of which sets us up…for what? Well, exactly. Mercurio has proven - with LoD and Bodyguard - as being a master of expect-the-unexpected, and much of the fun of, if you can call it fun, has been trying sift the red herrings from the ciphers that unlock each series over the course of its run. 

Like a more tortured version of a wet bank holiday afternoon’s game of Cluedo, LoD has become something of a national obsession. Social media yesterday was awash with comments of more or less the same ilk - “Why is it not yet 9pm?” (my own tweet). Family WhatsApp groups went quiet for an hour at 9pm and there was notable concern on Facebook when the preceding Top Gear ran two minutes over time.

Picture: BBC

Make no mistake, Line Of Duty has become event television. We sit there on the sofa arguing with ourselves, booing the baddies like pantomime barons, much as we did each Saturday night during The Masked Singer (look, I guessed Blob was Lenny Henry, almost from the beginning, but would the judges give in to the bleedin’ obvious? No.). Line Of Duty and The Masked Singer share in a television tradition that has been in danger of expiring in the era of box set binges: suspense. While we’ve all filled bored evenings (and afternoons and…er…even mornings…) during lockdown by ploughing through entire seasons of shows on Netflix and all the rest, with Line Of Duty the BBC is sticking to the traditions of cliffhanger Doctor Who endings. No, you will not be able to watch all seven episodes now on the iPlayer, and no, it will not be immediately available on DVD as a complete set. You will have to wait for the next episode, and the next one, and the next one after that. 

I’d like to think of another police procedural occupying the coveted 9pm slot to have caught the national imagination quite as this one has done since it made its debut in 2012, first on BBC2 before being promoted to the proverbial officer one rank higher, BBC1. Over that time we have sucked in by the twisting vortex of Mercurio’s mind, as plots have corkscrewed tantalisingly, each series testing our patience and, on occasion, our tolerance of credibility. That’s not to say there have been shark-jumping moments, just more of a tendency for Mercurio to lob in hand grenades of disruptive thinking that have seen pivotal series characters killed off as early as the opening episodes, while others quite consciously left hanging on to, quite honestly, mess with us. 

Like DI Matthew Cottan - delightfully afforded one of my favourite in-series nicknames of all time, ‘Dot’ - who survived three series as arch-villain ‘The Caddy’, embedded nefariously in AC-12 while remaining the principle conduit of terror and manipulation for the “OCG” (organised crime group - another of the myriad acronyms which add to the bandwidth-sapping plot lines). Or Denton, Keeley Hawes’ wonderfully sociopathic detective inspector whom, even up until her resurrection from prison and eventual death in her second series (at the pistol of Cottan), we never fully knew whether she was just misunderstood, if slightly loony, or truly in league with the dark side of ‘The City’, LoD’s fictional geography. Denton, it should be highlighted, is one of a number of prime examples of women being given equal and authentic screen time in the show. Without pandering to obvious wokeism, unbridled female characters have been a mainstay of Mercurio’s invention (including, it must be said, Hawes’ turn as the Home Secretary in his equally compelling Bodyguard). Thus, he’s also given us demented DI Huntley (Thandie Newton), devious lawyer Gill Biggelowe (another in league with the OCG), and in Series 5, the stone-faced Detective Chief Superintendent Patricia Carmichael (Anna Maxwell-Martin) and the new Deputy Chief Constable, Andrea Wise, all of whom could well reappear in this latest series in either protagonist or antagonist roles. It’s impossible to tell. 

In preparation for last night’s return, I recently gorged through the previous five seasons reminding myself of the threads, Ted Hastings’ zeitgeist-monstering catchphrases (“Mother of God!”, “sucking on diesel”, “bent coppers”, et al) and the somewhat byzantine connections between the police of this one particular city (believed to be in the Midlands) and the OCG. Perhaps because I’d only previously watched Line Of Duty in similar binges on long-haul flights, I’d not previously appreciated the parallels between it and The X-Files which, when it wasn’t doing ‘monster of the week’ episodes, had the recurring thread of a deep-state conspiracy (not entirely dissimilar to the QAnon cobblers) involving shadow governments and aliens. A little more plausibly LoD has featured corruption on a grand scale - and not just the old cliche of masonic handshakes to turn a blind eye to pub lock-ins and local councillors' parking tickets. It has involved largely unseen mobsters’ manipulation of police procedure to enable drug rings, prostitution and child abuse rackets, embedding corrupt officers throughout the Central Police constabulary, and usually in plot-changing positions. 

Picture: Instagram/Vicky McClure

Here we should mention ‘H’, the ruse that has been LoD’s X-Files-style undercurrent: Dot Cottan’s dying revelation of four finger taps cunningly suggested that H may not have been an individual, but four high-ranking coppers. With three now gone, we’re still left to wonder who the fourth is. Ted Hastings is not out of the clear (there have been subtle and not-so subtle suggestions that he might be an H, with actor Adrian Dunbar craftily pictured on social media audaciously wearing a Helly Hansen sweatshirt with its prominent double-H logo…). Towards the end of Series 5 we were fed snippets of doubt about Wise and Carmichael, with the latter’s assistant, Sergeant Tranter attempting to murder Gill Biggelowe in the didn’t-see-that-coming Fatal Attraction denouement in the season's final episode. That also concluded with Ryan Pilkington - recruited into gangster Tommy Hunter’s crime syndicate as a teenager - at his passing out parade at the police training college, teasingly setting up an Alien-style possibility of a spawn-of-the-devil introduction to come.

As amusing as some of this hokum might be, Line Of Duty’s return comes at an awkward time for policing in Britain. Even as the opening episode of Series 6 was going out last night, 12 officers were being injured - two seriously - and police vehicles set on fire in Bristol amid violent protests against the new Police And Crime Bill. The rioting comes soon after the tragic disappearance and murder of Sarah Everard, and the events of Clapham Common in the aftermath. I was in the midst of my Line Of Duty binge when the Everard case was playing out. Fiction began to blur into fact as I switched from the iPlayer to news bulletins revealing the grim outcome and distressing detail of a young woman’s alleged killer being a serving Metropolitan Police officer. All of a sudden, policing and police conduct - and the politics governing them - has come under greater scrutiny than ever before. I’m not being flippant in trying to conflate this with Line Of Duty’s return. It is, without any room for doubt, fiction, and somewhat stylised fiction too. It is no more a documentary about real investigations into police behaviour than The Crown is a factual profile of the royal family. But if it serves any moral purpose, beyond raising the nation’s blood pressure for an hour each Sunday night for the next seven weeks, it is to provide a timely reminder of the importance of trust and accountability in our public institutions.

Line Of Duty treads the finest of lines between escapism and reality. It’s clearly well researched, with Mercurio drawing on well placed sources to enrich his plots and dialogue. The police shooting of Jean Charles de Menezes and the murder of Jill Dando are believed to have been in the mix of inspiration. Where it goes after this latest run, however, is open to debate. The BBC is yet to commit to a seventh series. “I think as long as there’s an appetite from our audience for the show, we’ll keep going,” Dunbar told Graham Norton in January. “Why would we stop? Jed [Mercurio] has managed to keep the standard so high for so long, and people love the show. I hope it does go on.” Martin Compston (Arnott) recently told The Sun that the cast was aware of how big the show had become, but that they probably had one or two more series in them. “So you do start to become aware of the legacy around it - you want to be remembered as ‘one of the great shows’ and not be remembered for ‘a bad last series’. Mercurio himself recently told Jay Rayner’s Out To Lunch podcast that he hoped the show would continue: “I really want to carry on with Line of Duty,” he said. “I think that Season 6 proves that there is much more ground for us still to cover.” There are certainly plenty of lose ends to be tied up, and on the evidence of last night’s opener, new ones being created. Strap in, we’re not done yet. 

Goodbye Garry Shandling, half-man, half-desk

HBO

I sincerely hope the Grim Reaper is taking Easter off. Not wishing to be flippant, especially in this Holy Week - and one in which we've seen the very worst that humankind can do to itself - but since the beginning of 2016 the passing of entertainers who have meant so much more to people than merely authoring memorable songs or delivering superlative performances has been relentless.

Every time another falls, obiturists and commentators struggle, understandably, to say something new and original, a task made so much harder by the archly innovative nature of those we've lost this year. And yesterday we lost another one, Garry Shandling.

Perhaps you only know Shandling for just two of his achievements, It's Garry Shandling's Show and The Larry Sanders Show: if so, you will have been blessed with having seen two of modern television's greatest game changers. That, I know, sounds like more of the same hyperbole, but for once it is valid.

The former of these two ground-breaking TV shows would probably have been the first most people outside of the Los Angeles stand-up comedy circuit would have known of Shandling. Pre-dating Seinfeld by three years, It's Garry Shandling's Show presented a similar concept, a sitcom about the stand-up comedy of its star, and focusing on male neuroses with more than a hint of Jewishness about it too.

What made Shandling's show so unique was that it was a sitcom where the borders between fiction and reality were never fully clear: set largely in an apartment which faithfully duplicated Shandling's own Sherman Oaks home, Shandling and his fellow cast members would frequently break the 'fourth wall' as they acted out scenes from the comedian's own hang-ups.

Addressing the audience in character wasn't particularly new: George Burns had done it many years before in his own sitcom, and Oliver Hardy had made the exasperated stare-to-camera a staple of his films with Stan Laurel, always to hilarious effect. But Shandling and co-writer Alan Zweibel found a new purpose in their show which ran from 1986 until 1990.

Two years after It's Garry Shandling's Show ended, Shandling hit comedy gold again with the unbelievably prescient Larry Sanders Show. Johnny Carson's retirement from The Tonight Show in May 1992 became far more than a major media event - it triggered the now-infamous battle between David Letterman and Jay Leno to succeed him (superbly chronicled, by the way, in Bill Carter's authoritative tome, The Late Shift).

To this Brit, until I visited America for the first time at the end of 1992 I had never really appreciated the cultural importance of US TV's late night talk shows. Chat shows in the UK were hardly zeitgeist-grabbing: Terry Wogan's show on BBC1 three nights a week often appeared to be nothing more than an outlet for publicists, rather than anything that would set the conversational agenda in workplaces the following morning. And while Michael Parkinson may have held the position of Britain's king of chat for his A-list interviews since the 1970s, there was little edge to them, even the more memorable encounters.

In the US, however, the late night talk shows held a commanding presence in the TV schedules, partly due to Carson's legacy. They were prized properties for the networks, maintaining affluent demographics up long after their recommended bedtimes with their formula of hosts' monologues, celebrity appearances, banter with sidekicks and wacky stunts. This was much to the delight of premium advertisers who paid healthily to associate themselves with the late night pack.

Carson had, in the words of Scottish comedian Craig Ferguson (who took on his own show - The Late, Late Show) been "your best pal and uncle and dad rolled into one", but with a cheek and a subversiveness. Letterman, more so than his rival Leno, took that cheek and subversiveness and added a proprietary brand of wiseass cynicsm. "The only person I ever watched was Dave," wrote Ferguson in his memoir American On Purpose. "He was funny and bitter and I got the feeling he secretly (or maybe not so secretly) despised showbiz." That was probably more than just at the core of Shandling's Larry Sanders.

The Larry Sanders Show was never meant to draw on the late night war of 1992, but its arrival on HBO in the midst of conflict in the August of that year was remarkable in its timing. The added spice was that Shandling had often filled in for Carson and was even considered at one point to be another potential replacement.

More than a quarter of a century on, the Sanders show is still - and should be - considered the standard by which any other satirical sitcom should be measured, and its legacy looms large in so many great shows that followed in its wake - The Office (in all its international incarnations), Arrested Development, Curb Your Enthusiasm, 30 Rock, The Thick Of It and its American cousin, Veep, Extras, Episodes, Alan Partridge - the list goes on.

Perhaps this is not surprising: spend any amount of time around the entertainment business and you will encounter its paranoias, its hang-ups, its narcissism and its insecurities, all of which Shandling captured so brilliantly with Sanders and his entourage on a fictional late night talk show.

Much like his mostly-self portrayal on It's Garry Shandling's Show, Larry Sanders took another angle on Shandling himself, now supplanted into Hollywood's morass of vanity and insecurity. The difference, though, was that The Larry Sanders Show wasn't focused entirely around Shandling's character - in one episode memorably and sycophantically described by producer Artie (the exceptional Rip Torn) as "like one of those goddamn creatures out of Greek mythology: half-man, half-desk."

Many of the wickedly funny plotlines spun from Sanders' on-screen sidekick, the relentlessly dim Hank "Hey now!" Kingsley (Jeffrey Tambor). Supporting characters also took on prominent plot pivots, played by then-up and coming comic actors like Janeane Garofalo as acid-tongued talent booker Paula (succeeded by a pre-24 Mary Lynn Rajskub), Jeremy Piven, Wallace Langham as smartarse head writer Phil, and Breaking Bad/Better Caul Saul's Bob Odenkirk as Sanders' reprehensible agent Stevie Grant.

Everybody on The Larry Sanders Show possessed egos that were easily inflated and dangerously fragile, starting with Shandling's own character and his self-popularity obsession and, on occasion, the size of his arse. The delicious irony of this, however, was that Shandling and his co-writers regularly used The Larry Sanders Show as an opportunity for celebrities to willingly send themselves up. David Duchovny - then in the throes of his original X-Files fame - often appeared as a guest on the fictional Sanders' show displaying a barely-concealed homoerotic attachment for the host, an attraction that hilariously made Shandling's character even more unnerved (Shandling would later appear in a semi-spoof episode of The X-Files, Hollywood AD, alongside Duchovny's then wife Téa Leoni).

From Jennifer Aniston to Robin Williams, Alec Baldwin to Henry Winkler, and Warren Beatty to Warren Zevon, very real stars lined up to appear on the show, as much a testament to Shandling's creation, given that these same stars would simultaneously be appearing on the promotional circuit of all the for-real late night talk shows of the day.

Garry Shandling may have started out as another Midwest shuckster plying the LA comedy clubs, but over the course of the 12 years that he made It's Garry Shandling's Show and The Larry Sanders Show, he carved himself out as one of Hollywood's sharpest observers. Credit, of course, shouldn't go entirely to him - there were co-writers on both projects - but when you look back on them now, they were both of their time and ahead of their time.

As the real late night talk shows can often be accused of, American TV is often formulaic. Neither of Shandling's most memorable creations could be accused of that. Even if his subsequent acting career didn't ever plough such rich furrows, these two shows will ensure a prominent place in TV's hall of fame, reminders that right before the 'golden age of television' came along, with heavyweight, earnest and deservedly-praised 'must-see' shows like The Sopranos, The Wire and Breaking Bad, one slightly nerdy, stereotypically neurotic Jewish comedian from Chicago broke through barriers and accepted norms with two hysterical shows that will always be regarded as nothing but genius. No more flipping.