Contemporary British Television Crime Drama

Cops on the Box

Ruth McElroy, Ruth McElroy

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781317160953
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Sozialwissenschaften
• Subtopic: Medienwissenschaften

Contemporary British Television Crime Drama examines one of the medium's most popular genres and places it within its historical and industrial context. The television crime drama has proved itself capable of numerous generic reinventions and continues to enjoy some of the highest viewing figures. Crime drama offers audiences stories of right and wrong, moral authority asserted and resisted, and professionals and criminals, doing so in ways that are often highly entertaining, innovative, and thought provoking. In examining the appeal of this highly dynamic genre, this volume explores how it responds not only to changing social debates on crime and policing, but also to processes of hybridization within the television industry itself. Contributors, many of whom are leading figures in UK television studies, analyse popular series such as Broadchurch, Between the Lines, Foyle's War, Poirot, Prime Suspect, Sherlock and Wallander. Essays examine the main characteristics of television crime drama production, including the nature of trans-Atlantic franchises and literary and transnational adaptations. Adopting a range of feminist, historical, aesthetic and industrial approaches, they offer incisive interrogations that provide readers with a rich understanding of the allure of crime drama to both viewers and commissioners.

Part I

The British Crime Drama – New Adventures in an Established Genre

1 Bad Sex, Target Culture and the Anti-Terror State

New Contexts for the Twenty-First Century British Television Police Series

Charlotte Brunsdon

This chapter is concerned with the early twenty-first century police series on British television, taking the 2010 cancellation of The Bill (1984–2010) as a significant temporal marker. In this period, I will argue that, despite appearances, the British television police series is in difficulty. Even though there seem to be television police and crime series all over the British schedules, and some digital channels are devoted solely to the genres of crime, my argument is that the changing contexts of policing have hollowed out the necessary assumptions of the British television police world. This crisis is hiding in the light of television screens peopled by Victorian policemen, 1960s policemen, 1950s policewomen, pathologists with policing remits, serial killers, senior women police officers and even charismatic senior Black officers. Before I outline this argument – and it will be an outline, a sketch to provoke discussion – I want to set out some methodological preliminaries.

The television police series is a durable and flexible ingredient of the television schedule, one which can be transformed in a variety of ways to suit changing institutional, cultural and historical contexts. The generic constants of the police series – its narrative configuration of police officers, criminals and ‘community’, its historically variant crimes, its technologies of detection – are sufficiently familiar to provide ground for both innovation and imitation. The police series can answer particular demands at specific historical moments in different broadcasting contexts, while always, at the same time, at some level, articulating something about living as a citizen there and then. For example, in Britain, there is a very long tradition of the police series being used to satisfy demands that television should represent the regions of the United Kingdom. Police series such as Heartbeat (Yorkshire, YTV, 1992–2011), Wycliffe (Devon, HTV, 1994–98) and The Chief (East Anglia, ATV, 1990–95) have contributed significantly to the place images of their settings, and some – like Taggart (Glasgow, STV, 1983–2010) – have been so successful that the franchise continued after the 1994 death of Mark McManus, the actor who played DI Taggart. In a rather different way, a show like Dick Wolf’s Law and Order (NBC, 1990–2010) can multiply its revenues by franchising the format for customised production in different national contexts, providing a ‘glocal’ variant, sensitive to local settings, policing and legal conventions, while also still exporting the US version.

The police series is both a reliable resource for broadcasters, and also a rewarding site for researchers, partly because of its continuing attraction for audiences. The genre is ubiquitous, but does not always do the same things and is not always interesting for the same reasons. My concern here will be mainly with the relationship between the police series and the contemporary social world, but I am not proposing that this is the only aspect which merits study, nor do I think this approach should be pursued without complementary understanding of shifting broadcasting economies and questions of style, genre and performance. Whilst I do not have much to say here about the long-running Midsomer Murders (ITV, 1997–), with its England of villages, vicars, blackmail and black magic (but no Black people), there are clearly analyses to be made about the persistence of this image of England, and its popularity with audiences both in Britain and abroad.¹ My aim here is to propose some ways of thinking about the changing historical contexts of the twenty-first century British police series. My interest lies in the way in which the contemporary police series, because of its traditions of headline sensitivity and realism, is in some sense a state-of-the-nation genre, while at the same time being a genre through which the state, in however etiolated a form, is figured. It works over questions of what is permitted, forbidden, feared and concealed in particular cultures; how villainy, victimhood and law enforcement are enacted; and to what extent and how the different players in these dramas – community, criminals, police – can be understood as responsive to broader social concerns. There is not space to make these arguments at length, nor to engage with some of the stimulating new scholarship on the genre, such as the recent books by Sue Turnbull (2014) and Helen Piper (2015), but I hope that a relatively unadorned presentation will make them available for others to challenge and develop.

‘If We Can Do this Show in Uniforms’

Just as the police investigate crime and law-breaking, programme makers have used the genre to investigate contemporary society. I briefly want to consider two very distinguished examples of this which are separated by 40 years. Firstly, the playwright John McGrath writing retrospectively in 1975 about the way in which the police series format could be used in the innovatory 1960s series, Z Cars (BBC, 1962–78), which was set near Liverpool in the fictional Newtown, based on Kirkby. The aim was

[T]o use a Highway Patrol format, but to use the cops as a key or a way of getting into a whole society … a kind of documentary about people’s lives in these areas, and the cops were incidental – they were the means of finding out about people’s lives.²

This can be contrasted with Tony Garnett, speaking much later, in 1998, about the controversial series he produced (as World Productions), The Cops (BBC, 1998–2001):

[W]hat I really wanted to do was a show that allowed us to go into parts of our society that are not shown on television, and which are not the experiences of the middle classes who are watching. The society we want to represent in The Cops is one where ‘sink estates’ show the result of grinding poverty through the generations: it’s a society where there’s no hope or expectation, and a society where all sense of community and stability has disappeared.

Now if I’d gone to the BBC or Ch4 and said ‘I’d like to do a series about social workers’, or a similar group of people that would naturally access this context, they’d have thrown me out of the room; but by going and saying ‘I want to do a show about cops’ I could be sure of an enthusiastic response. They’re very interested then … So I thought, if we can do this show in uniforms, I can get the show made and I can get an audience to watch it, but the uniforms will take us into parts of society that we usually don’t enter.³

In each of these cases, the police series is the pretext. The interest, for both the makers of Z Cars and The Cops, was in a wider social realist/documentary project. They want to use the genre as a way of gaining access to television, a mass medium which offers unprecedented opportunities to bring the realities of excluded lives into the living rooms of its audiences. As McGrath goes on to point out, there are difficulties with this project which are manifest in the serial form, the ways in which the recurrent figures of the police develop their own autonomy: ‘After the cops kept appearing week after week people began to fall in love with them, and they became stars. So the pressure was on to make them the subjects, rather than the device.’⁴

McGrath’s comment illustrates the history of television through a key difference between himself and Garnett. McGrath is writing about a project, Z Cars, near the beginning of the development of contemporary, written-for-television serial drama in the early 1960s and he is, as a writer, learning about what happens through regular broadcasting. Garnett, in contrast, is by 1998 a very seasoned industry professional who is, in turn, using the police series itself as a strategic device ‘if we can do this show in uniforms’ to get a commission. In each case though, there is confidence about the suitability of the police genre for investigating contemporary culture. TV cop shows are a vehicle for a traditional social realist project, which, in Raymond Williams’s terms, will be ‘contemporary, secular, and socially extensive’ (1977, p. 65).

New Contexts for the TV Police Series

It is this project and use of the genre which I am arguing is currently in crisis, and to make this argument, I will return to an essay I wrote about the genre 20 years ago. My argument then was that the police show at that time was a privileged and dynamic genre through which some of the difficult social transformations of the period were articulated. Writing in 1996 – before the election of the last Labour government – in what proved to be the final year of the Conservative government elected in 1979, I proposed the idea of the discursive context as a way of specifying, in the broadest terms, different material conditions, discourses and practices which could be seen to have particular resonances for the police series. I suggested that the relevant discursive contexts for this period were ‘law and order’, ‘privatisation’ and ‘equal opportunities’ (1998). I argued that the police series (as distinct from the crime or detective series) was proving a particularly dynamic genre because of the structural relationship between the police and the state, which was thrown into relief in a period when the post-war settlement’s understanding of the relationship between the citizen and the state was under attack. This is not an argument that the people involved in making these programmes were necessarily involved in a conscious project to discuss politics of the period such as urban rioting (e.g., events in 1981, 1985 and the Poll-tax riots of 1990), the neo-liberal assault on the welfare state, the militarisation of the police and the policing of the Miners’ Strike. Instead, it was an argument that the premises of the genre, and its historical headline-sensitivity, meant that it became, in roughly the 1982–94 period, an often inadvertent site through which the viewers’ and the citizens’ relationship with the state is imagined and worried over.

Times change, and so do genres. Here, working with an imperfect and perhaps premature periodisation, which is roughly 2002 to 2012/13, with a caesura in 2007/08 for the financial crisis, I want to revisit this methodological device of the discursive context. I am fully aware that ‘discursive context’ does not provide any hard evidence of the relationship between police series and the contexts in which they are produced, but it is, in its very imprecision, usefully suggestive, and will make possible an exploration of whether there are equivalent formations in the current period. In doing this, I will be putting aside the question, which I have addressed elsewhere, of the ways in which changes in the television industry and its modes of circulation make this a much trickier project in the twenty-first century (Brunsdon, 2010). Despite what Graeme Turner (2009) has accurately characterised as an attenuated relationship between television and the national, there is still some purchase, in a country which produces and exports as much television as Britain, in considering the contexts in which it is made and viewed. However, the informing and shaping context must be an international one, that of the ‘War on Terror’, and it is this that provides the opening periodisation. In the aftermath of the attacks on the World Trade Center, the war in Iraq, ‘extraordinary rendition’ and Guantanamo Bay, is ‘law and order’, so important for so much of the twentieth century, still a significant context for policing? Now that so many services previously provided by the local and national state have been privatised, is that privatisation still a contested and resonant category? How has ‘austerity’ and its associated macho posturing affected the fictional world of the police service? And what of equal opportunities in the twenty-first century?

If the first relevant discursive context in the earlier period was the persistence of ‘law and order’, this has been the area of most significant transformation, for instead of ideas of law and order, the dominant formation is now the apparatus of anti-terror legislation and the rhetoric and practices of the new necessities of security: the anti-terror state. The anti-terror state (which is the home-front version for a country that has been at war for much of the twenty-first century) in its very discursive constitution, trumps ‘law and order’ in the name of protecting a citizenry which will, in return, render up ancient rights such as habeas corpus, privacy, jury trials held in public and, through the introduction of prolonged legal detention without charge, pretty much the right to be considered innocent until proven guilty. Detention without charge or trial, in particular, opens up a narrative black hole in the generic rules of the police series and is one element in the current shift towards conspiracy narratives, while the ambiguity of the identity of the operatives of the anti-terror state makes another shift away from drama based on uniformed ‘boys in blue.’ For the iconography of the British police series, one thing is clear: the officers are either armed, female, or living and policing in remote, often picturesque non-metropolitan centres.

A related and dependent context is the rise and recognition of surveillance culture. The importance of technology to the history of the police genre is well documented, from fingerprints to radios to telephones. In this long history, surveillance culture was already having significant effects on the look of the TV crime series – the multi-screen aesthetic which incorporates CCTV footage into the narrative world; the grainy look of CCTV footage; the seemingly easy recourse to the tracking of the movements of individuals anywhere – and its narrative possibilities and pace. However, the Wikileaks affair followed by the Snowden revelations has shifted and expanded the discursive context of surveillance, and the ambivalences of constantly surveilled citizenship have become more readily apparent.

The second contemporary discursive context is target culture, the new managerialism with its imperatives of ‘deliverables’, ‘outputs’, ‘impact’, ‘performance’, ‘competitive tender’; its perverse adjectives (‘robust’, ‘challenging’, ‘diverse’, ‘vibrant’); and its TLAs (three letter acronyms⁵), infecting the whole of the former public sector. The privatisation which was a significant discursive context in the 1980s has now become more taken for granted, and it is widely accepted – at least in practice – that essential services will be outsourced to agencies and that in a competitive bidding environment, ‘deliverables’ must be quantified. The erosion and devaluation of ideals of public service, which had been such a core part of nineteenth and twentieth century British culture (patriarchal and patrician as it often was) has led to a pervasive cynicism and demoralisation in public life in which there is a widespread understanding of the gulf between the preposterous PR pronouncements about how much better services are being delivered and the experience ‘on the ground.’ While this PR driven target culture itself has been the direct object of satire in Babylon (Channel 4, 2013–14), what is more interesting for my purposes is its penetration into the everyday detail of the police genre.

Historically, the genre has always been hostile to ‘paperwork’, and one of its most familiar tropes is the opposition between the real police and those ‘upstairs’, the managers obsessed with procedure and filing. The Sweeney (ITV, 1975–78) used to provide a particularly fine instance of this in the struggles between Carter (Dennis Waterman), Regan (John Thaw) and their boss, Haskins (Garfield Morgan), but it is widespread across police fiction in television and film. The overwhelming current sense of ‘service delivery’ being driven by targets in ways that most strongly recall Soviet five-year plans and their fantasy statistics, gives a new pertinence to these traditional generic tropes of hostility to directives from upstairs, and there is an interesting and noticeable strand of critique present in some shows in relation to changes which do not permit proper policing. While the US series The Wire (HBO, 2005–08) provides, partly because of its immense duration, a very sustained c...