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.