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It's no laughing matter as police keep an eye on our TV cops
When television executives find themselves struggling to fill the schedules, the fallback position is to commission a crime drama.
Ever since The Sweeney in the 1970s, crime has been compulsive viewing and our taste for it shows little sign of waning.
Running for almost 25 years, The Bill lays claim to being the longest running police drama and with the likes of Life on Mars and American imports CSI and The Wire also muscling into prime-time slots, viewers are only ever half-an-hour away from a good murder.
Behind the scenes, an army of scriptwriters, producers and directors are working overtime to satisfy the nation's appetite for crime, desperate to come up with bigger and better headline grabbing stories.
Marianne Colbran was one of them. During the 1980s, she worked as scriptwriter on The Bill, but recently made the move into academia, joining the law department at the London School of Economics with the hope of discovering how television programmes affect public perceptions of policing.
"The people behind The Bill insisted the scriptwriters knew their stuff and we spent a lot of time with officers seeing what the job really involved," says Marianne, who recently took part in the British Society of Criminology's annual conference at the University of Huddersfield. "However, ultimately you're writing a drama, it's not a fly-on-the-wall documentary so inevitably things tend to get a
bit skewed.
"Programmes like The Bill are as much about the characters as the storyline and having stepped back from scriptwriting I wanted to see what ripple effect television had."
Gathering together a group of working officers, Marianne sat them down in front of the television and when the end credits rolled asked them not only how accurate the portrayal was, but how shows influence the public. While prepared for accusations of inaccuracy, what surprised her was just how many felt the programmes lacked comedy.
"Police officers can find themselves on the front line of some horrific crimes," she says. "Working every day in that environment means they develop a peculiarly black sense of humour and it was that they really felt was missing. Crime dramas tend to be very serious, it doesn't somehow feel right to undercut a murder investigation with comedy, even if it is of the black variety, but some felt it made the characters come across as two dimensional.
"Script-writers can also be guilty of relying on stereotypes. There are countless detectives on television who end up turning to drink or neglecting their marriage because of the stress. Of course, that does happen in real life, but there are many thousands of officers who have happy home lives."
Artistic licence aside, the officers who took part in Marianne's research also suggested the subliminal effects of programmes like The Bill were potentially much more serious.
"Inevitably, with dramas there is a satisfying conclusion, a crime is committed and solved within the hour," she says. "The problem for real life police is that it gives the public too high expectations. Often people who find themselves a victim of crime only know how investigations work from what they have seen on television.
"They are left wondering why it takes days rather than hours to get the results of forensic evidence and if it's not explained to them, there's a feeling the officers aren't trying hard enough."
Given the potential problems highlighted by a programme like The Bill, reaction to Life on Mars and the sequel Ashes to Ashes should perhaps have been even more critical. Detective Chief Inspector Gene Hunt, happy to beat a confession out of a suspect, is hardly a model for modern day policing.
"Funnily enough, they loved Life on Mars," says Marianne. "They actually said the show increased public support partly because it showed how far the force had come in the last 30 years, but also because people could identify with the characters. The bad old days of policing were far enough in the past to make a drama out of it.
"However, the one show they said they all loved was Cops.
A lot of people don't remember the show which went out in the 1970s, but it really made an impression on the officers I spoke to. Not an awful lot happened, but it focused on the camaraderie between those working in the police and that's something which more recent shows haven't done."
Marianne is continuing her research, but should she ever return to scriptwriting her work at LSE will she says give her a whole new slant on crime. "I would definitely want to include moreof the day-to-day aspects of policing," she says.
"There's a knee-jerk reaction which says that isn't entertaining, but in the right hands I think it would provide an opportunity to explore the more human side of the job."
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Saturday 11 February 2012
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