Line Of Duty

Fresh off the realisation I could in fact enjoy a British police drama, after devouring Happy Valley on Netflix many years after its BBC debut, my insatiable desire for content saw me follow the crowd into Line Of Duty.  My phone set to one side, I squished myself into the sofa in my current flat’s TV room, tuned out the sounds of the girls upstairs constantly lumping around as if taking part in some sort of overweight aerobics session, telling myself that I am only constantly staying in and watching this much telly while I save my final pounds for the upcoming transaction of my first flat, ignoring the fact that I’ve actually overstretched myself and won’t have any money left for furniture when I do get in there, and allowed the first episode to wash over me.  I was ready for drama, tension, twists and turns.  I was there willing myself to be hooked.  But I didn’t click.  Within ten minutes, I was listless.  My fingers twitched for my smartphone screen.  Maybe someone had sent me a funny Whatsapp.  No, I had to concentrate.  Perhaps I was doing it wrong.  The next night, I tried another episode, bound by some sort of duty to carry on.  Possibly even acting in the line of duty LOL.  (I’ve put the LOL in so we all know this isn’t funny).

“Guys, I don’t think I’m into Line Of Duty,” I told some friends in the back of a car on the way to Bristol.  I might as well have said I had voted for Brexit, such was the pouring out of scorn each passenger saw fit to direct at me.  They chastened me, insisting I persist with further episodes or risk missing out on televisual gold.  But, here, in a sort of listicle, are the things that stopped me loving the show immediately:

The actors’ faces

I don’t mean their physical features, I mean their expressions.  And by expressions, I mean nothing.  I get the impression that everyone had been directed to play their parts without disturbing their impenetrable glares.  Lennie James does snarl around quite wonderfully in the first series (otherwise seen dispatching walkers in The Walking Dead) but Vicky McClure (DI Kate Fleming) just seems to stare and stare, while Gina McKee (who, to me, is always Irene from The Forsyte Saga) appears frozen (later on: literally…).  Maybe this is what life is like when you have low emotional intelligence: faces are just unchanging groupings of eyes, noses and teeth.  However, let’s say the facial emoting is simply subtler than the melodrama you might normally see, and, cleverly, it allows the actors to hide clues and conceal cues that would otherwise help you work it out all too quickly: who are the baddies and who are the goodies?

The lack of geography

I’ve talked before about liking a strong theme.  Happy Valley, for example, had the theme of being set in and around Halifax, which really rooted it in a human space.  Line Of Duty just seems to be in a big, grey city.  There’s talk of Central and East Midlands Constabularies, but I’m certain I’ve never heard an actual city named (and I’m not going to check this, either, as confidence is something the only ally of the wrong).  This is compounded by the various accents with which our heroes shout things at each other: Northern Irish, Estuary English, Northern.  In addition, any mapping systems used to track suspects look like they’ve been mocked up on ClipArt rather than taken from any real street plan, especially in the earlier series.

DS Steve Arnott

Not being funny, yeah, as I don’t want my input on the internet to be saying nasty things about people, but, this character: insert scratchy-chin emoji.  As a mediocre amateur dramatist myself, I am gonna say it: I’m not sure Martin Compston is a good actor.  Maybe I just wanted him to be more of a character actor, not the leading man.  His dominance of the first episodes felt like a red herring – I expected him to be offed pretty quickly.  Yet it slowly dawned on me: he was central to everything.  His hair aggravated me at first, as his face was framed by a ridge that no other human barnet has.  Then I struggled with his voice, as he sounded like his lines were too much effort, as if he were a guide vocal to the real performance.  Over time, his character became something of the studmuffin among lady witnesses, when the last thing he needed was a sleazy side.  In the current fifth series, he’s been styled at last, sporting designer stubble and showing commitment to little waistcoats by never taking his off.  He’s done nothing to redeem himself, but he’s grown in my affections as a hero.  I no longer secretly chuckle when he’s assaulted by criminals.

Over time, the above points all become part of Line Of Duty mythology.  There’s a style and framework in which the drama unfolds, and we’ve just got to respect that.  Each six-episode series opens with a dramatic police operation, normally going wrong.  We then deal with the aftermath, coming to things through the eyes of AC12, the police force’s internal anti-corruption unit.  If you’ve ever wondered who polices the police, then it’s these police that police the police in the police force.  I don’t know how they pick what to look into.  The opening operation could have gone swimmingly, and they start sniffing around anyway.  It’s for this reason that most other police hate them, giving each of the AC12ers a ballsy resilience that’s great to get on board with.  Either way, two layers of tension interface.  Firstly, there’s the investigation itself.  Then, there’s the eternal question (at least until the big reveal in the season finale) regarding whether the heroic bobby under scrutiny is a bent copper or not.  We’re kept guessing, but enough is revealed episode by episode that you gain a growing sense of closure, rather than being driven insane by never getting anywhere.  It’s fine storytelling, so let’s focus on three things that make it excellent:

The high admin of the police interrogations

AC12 need to do lots of interviews to find out facts.  They still seem to record these on cassette, which reminds me of taping the Top 40 off the radio back in the nineties, but this actually adds a nice element to the tension, as each session seems to begin with a few seconds of a blaring sound that signals the start of the cassette.  In each series, this blare gets longer, until they seem to sit there for about forty minutes just starting at each other (with blank expressions, obviously) over the airhorn.  But, that’s not even the best part.  For each interrogation, all the evidence must be ordered and arranged into a handy printout for each participant, and this must tally up with the presentation on screen.  I can barely sort out slides for the most basic of office meetings, but these AC12 folk are dab hands at making sure everything matches and is neatly packaged.  They might be great at detecting, but they are also fantastic at admin.  But, perhaps, this love of admin is to be expected from people with such unswerving devotion to the wearing of lanyards.

“He must be afforded the courtesy of being questioned by an officer at least one rank superior.”

This line is said in every series.  During the recorded interview, no junior riffraff can tackle their big bosses about malpractice.  The police, given its military tendencies, is obsessed with rank.  Failing to finish a sentence with the correct sir or ma’am can lead to upbraiding that is frankly lacking from my open plan-sitting, skinny jean-wearing office culture in the media industry.  This line often results in the same question being asked by someone of the right seniority, making its pointlessness clear to all.  But, once you’re a seasoned Line Of Duty fan, you relish all the curious turns of phrase that pepper police protocol.  We’ve started doing this among ourselves, now, saying things for the benefit of the DIR, directing people’s attention to piece of evidence RH5 and serving each other Regulation 15s.  Such fun.

Superintendent Ted Hastings

With nostrils as big as his hair is lustrous, Hastings runs AC12.  Instead of end-of-year reviews, he shouts at people in his office.  And it’s all done in the fieriest Northern Irish accent, berating Fleming and Arnott like they’re naughty siblings.  He’s as authoritative in his white-shirted officewear as he is in his bulletproof vest, equally able in both get-ups to dispense witty quips that belittle his suspects.  I really want him to tell me off, but then be secretly proud of me at the same time.

All in all, then, I’m now a fan of Line Of Duty.  The fifth series is currently playing out on the BBC, in case you missed any of the billboards that are plastered all over town.  And, most importantly, it’s gained me access to office chat, as everyone seems to have decided spontaneously to catch up on old series on Netflix.  Jed Mercurio, who’s writing the whole thing, can now add boxset genius to his list of qualities, alongside man with name that sounds incredibly cool.  For the benefit of the tape, I am now finishing the blogpost here, rather than going on to say things about too many guns for a British drama, the high mortality rate of police officers in the show or my inability to work out the ranks (Detective Chief Inspector is my favourite as it’s such a mouthful).  I do not have to say anything, actually, but it may harm my defence if I do not mention when blogging something which I later rely on in conversation.

Westworld

Sometimes you want a TV show to make you ponder the very essence of what it means to be a human.  And sometimes you just want something with plenty of sex and violence.  Maybe these two things aren’t that separate after all, as Westworld manages to deliver both, and all in a cheeky cowboy hat.  Let’s be honest, sex and violence are, after all, key parts of the human experience.  According to Westworld, they are definitely key parts of the cowboy experience too.

Billed, as with all big new shows, as something that would fill the Game Of Thrones hole in our lives, I let the first series of Westworld pass me by.  It was everywhere on my Sky EPG, posters followed me on my commute and trailers constantly rolled on every screen I went near.  It all made me lose interest, especially as nobody in the office seemed to be talking about it.  Could this big-budget western be a major dud?  But then, looking for a new show to start, and giving careful consideration to what should be covered on Just One More Episode, I consulted IMDB’s top rated TV shows: a list of 250 programmes that viewers have rewarded with up to ten stars.  Once I filtered out all the really old stuff and nature documentaries, Westworld (currently at #36) was the highest ranked entity I thought I could bear to watch.

My final barrier to overcome was that Westworld was also the name of a hip hop clothing shop at university and one particular friend used to dress in their attire from head to toe after watching You Got Served.  We all experiment with style when we’re young, but I should emphasise there is no age limit to enjoying a film produced as a streetdance vehicle for B2K.

From the cowboy chat so far, it should be clear that Westworld is a western, of sorts.  Not the kind of western made in the fifties that they repeat on TCM and your dad still watches during the daytime even though it’s sunny outside.  The western world of Westworld is actually a theme park.  Rather than queuing up at Thorpe Park to lose your lunch on a roller coaster though, the visitors to Westworld inhabit a near-future USA where technology has advanced enough to create artificial beings tasked with bringing history to life.  The wealthy book passage to this resurrected era, dressed for the period (a bit like those weird photo booths that actually are a part of normal theme parks), arriving by steam train at a frontier town.  Have they hired impoverished actors to flesh out the illusion?  No; these are, essentially, robots.

Right then, so it’s robots and cowboys – together at last.  Of all the historic periods you could create using animatronics, I’m still not sure I would go for cowboys.  What about all the courtly intrigue of Tudor England, or the licentious lifestyles of the Romans?  That might just be me.  Either way, the cowboy theme allows the paying visitors to shoot guns and whore about (literally) with little concern for the consequences.  Only the hosts can be killed, as they are programmed not to hurt humans.  Their purpose of existence is solely to fulfil their storylines in order to entertain.  But, such is their sophistication as pieces of tech, the ultimate tension comes from the slowly revealed truth that the hardware is starting to get emotional.  Cue a glacially paced and artfully crafted build up through series one to the inevitable pay off of the lunatics taking over the asylum.

With sinister grandpa Anthony Hopkins as the park’s founder and the hosts’ co-inventor, Dr Robert Ford, it’s all a bit Jurassic Park.  But that’s a huge part of the fun.  Let’s just say the future doesn’t look great for theme parks.  However, it does look good for A-list actors, as the cast is a roll call of household names, or at least names where you recognise the faces and can get distracted agonising over trying to remember where you saw them last.  They’re all enjoying themselves immensely, from James Marsden providing the cheekbones and jawline of the handsome cowboy hero, to Thandie Newton having the time of her life running the whorehouse as a tart with not just a heart, but a very complicated backstory.

And that’s the beauty of it.  The hosts play out storylines where they die, but then they are picked up by staff, tidied up, wiped and rebooted and sent out to play again in an endless cycle of suffering.  What if the memories start to come back?  Saying more isn’t possible without reeling off spoilers, so let’s instead focus on some questions that I always ask myself while watching.

Why do they have to be naked when they are getting serviced?

When a host is in for repair, they sit in glass rooms in the nude, while human technicians re-programme them using fancy tablets.  Not only is it unrealistic that the tech hooks up every time (the wifi never disconnects temperamentally) and nobody suggests turning it off and then turning it on again, but you’d think someone could afford the poor hosts something for their modesty.  Instead, their exposure further emphasises their abuse by the humans that run them.  Luckily, Newton’s character Maeve does finally get her own back in the second series, almost recognising the show’s surplus of wrinkly willies with one more wrinkly willy.

What’s up with the way the hosts die?

They’re robots, but they seem to have circulatory systems.  When shot with guns, blood spurts forth.  It’s not enough that they mimic humans in every way, they have this further facet of realism to provide.  Is the hardware designed so that injuries are categorised into fatal and non-fatal so the tech knows exactly when to shut down in order to maintain the storyline?  It’s kind of philosophical really.  Nevertheless, they’re back in the park the next day to do it all again.  They also never run out of battery, whereas my iPhone needs two charges a day just to keep up with Whatsapp.

Where is this place?

For the concept to be believed, we need to accept that somewhere there is a massive expanse of land that can be given over to leisure.  Our view of the outside world is, at first, limited, so we are as blinkered as the hosts to life beyond Westworld.  By the second season, characters suddenly start referring to an island, which curiously has never come up before, so I am wondering if they are now writing themselves out of a hole.

All of these niggles are just part and parcel of creating something so ambitious.  The scope of the show is as enormous as the park needs to be.  The first series takes it time letting you into Westworld and then works through twists that shatter your understanding.  Don’t get impatient, as repetition is used to show the farcical nature of the hosts’ lives.  I do admit that I have fallen asleep in almost every single episode, but don’t let that put you off.  It’s something that I have been watching late at night when I invariably start to reason that I can watch the last part with my eyes closed and then wake up to find it’s all over.  I’ve therefore had to re-watch some sequences a few times.  It’s better when you’re awake, or you won’t understand what’s going on.  The one time I didn’t fall asleep, I was ironing shirts at the same time as watching, so that kept me up luckily.

The complete first series is available on Sky Boxsets, while the second season is in the middle of premiering as I type.  This means I have gone from being able to hit up an episode each evening of series one to having to wait for my weekly instalment like some historical artefact.  Maybe this is how cowboys had to view boxsets before on-demand platforms existed.  I hope I remember what’s going on, but this enforced rationing should ensure more time to contemplate Westworld’s inner philosophical debate.  After all, what does define human consciousness?  I shall give it a good think while my eyes are glued mindlessly to the screen, trying to stay awake, watching naked people shoot each other on the telly.