Watching the Detectives
BBC1, 10.55pm
ER
Channel 4, 9.00pm
TV is very fond of reality. From Get Me Publicity I'm a Big Brother Survivor to Sky journalists faking missile launches, the medium likes authenticity so much it can't resist adding improvements. What's your opinion? Here's a phone-in poll. What's the state of the world? Here's a dramatised reconstruction. All of it sort-of true; all ''real''.
The trouble with this, of course, is that, after a while, the actual and invented begin to blend. Everyone has heard of the poor dears who believe that real people live in a real Coronation Street. So how do we judge all those ''based on a true story'' movies, all those ''grittily realistic'' dramas? And what happens when unvarnished truth tries to find its way to the screen?
First, if Watching the Detectives is anything to go by, it gets banished to the scheduling dungeons, presumably because a cop show involving real cops might confuse viewers. Secondly, paradoxes creep in. The truth about crime is rarely entertaining. Often it is grim; sometimes it is dull. Yet someone still has the job of turning it into watchable TV for an audience raised on The Bill.
Watching the Detectives did its best. Filmed over four years, it neither shirked the task of showing police work in all its tedium, nor did it spare us many revolting details. At first sight it was wholly admirable; on second thoughts it was troubling, and not just because of its content.
Danny Thompson finds Shane Collier in his former girlfriend's house and stabs him to death. Thompson then dismembers and buries the body while threatening to kill the girl and her children if she contacts the police. South Yorkshire detectives are certain a murder has taken place, but months pass before they discover a corpse. Amidst it all three young children become crucial witnesses.
All this was true; all this was also, in TV terms, an excellent plot. The actual children were not exploited, at least not explicitly, but since actors voiced their words in reconstructions, and since those reconstructions formed the film's deliberately dramatic opening, the effect was unsettling. Equally, you could not help but feel that coppers with their graveyard humour were responding, consciously or not, to the camera. Cinema verite was long since devalued, in any case, by movies in search of ''realism''. Watching the Detectives was real; it happened. Yet somehow it felt like an episode from an especially hard-hitting drama.
ER, bewitched by its own cleverness, long ago lost any claim to that title. Last night's episode, number 200, promised two episodes for the price of one, with Pratt on his last night-shift, Carter on day duty, and an eclipse thrown in for the benefit of anyone who missed the dark/light conceit. It was a mess.
Perhaps realising as much, the writers threw in every calamity they could think of. An amputation; a mass suicide; another gangland shooting: all human death was here. Noah Wyle's Dr John Carter deserves better.
Why are you making commenting on The Herald only available to subscribers?
It should have been a safe space for informed debate, somewhere for readers to discuss issues around the biggest stories of the day, but all too often the below the line comments on most websites have become bogged down by off-topic discussions and abuse.
heraldscotland.com is tackling this problem by allowing only subscribers to comment.
We are doing this to improve the experience for our loyal readers and we believe it will reduce the ability of trolls and troublemakers, who occasionally find their way onto our site, to abuse our journalists and readers. We also hope it will help the comments section fulfil its promise as a part of Scotland's conversation with itself.
We are lucky at The Herald. We are read by an informed, educated readership who can add their knowledge and insights to our stories.
That is invaluable.
We are making the subscriber-only change to support our valued readers, who tell us they don't want the site cluttered up with irrelevant comments, untruths and abuse.
In the past, the journalist’s job was to collect and distribute information to the audience. Technology means that readers can shape a discussion. We look forward to hearing from you on heraldscotland.com
Comments & Moderation
Readers’ comments: You are personally liable for the content of any comments you upload to this website, so please act responsibly. We do not pre-moderate or monitor readers’ comments appearing on our websites, but we do post-moderate in response to complaints we receive or otherwise when a potential problem comes to our attention. You can make a complaint by using the ‘report this post’ link . We may then apply our discretion under the user terms to amend or delete comments.
Post moderation is undertaken full-time 9am-6pm on weekdays, and on a part-time basis outwith those hours.
Read the rules hereComments are closed on this article