Television - Andrew Billen holds up well under interrogation

There's so much detective fiction on television that we should be experts already. BBC2's documentary series Catching the Killers (Fridays, 9pm) shows how little we actually do know about the mechanics of crime detection, and how much we take on trust about the methodology of Sherlocks old and new.

The major narrative weakness in NYPD Blue, for example, is that the killer is invariably caught via a confession, wheedled, conned or beaten out of him. Just once it would be nice, I used to think (and it would be nice if Channel 4 could hand over the latest series it owes us so I could think it again), if Sipowicz and co got their guy bang to rights even as he kept protesting his innocence. Who, after all, can forget the impact at the end of the original Prime Suspect when Tom Bell entered the dock and said "Not guilty"?

The second documentary in the series, "Make 'Em Talk", a survey of interrogation in the 20th century, explained that this is not how it works in the States, an insight that at least made NYPD Blue look authentic.

Interrogation has always been central to American policing. Rules on its conduct are not strict. Henry Hunter, a cop with the San Francisco force, happily admitted: "We can use trickery, we can use deceit, as long as it only appeals to a guilty conscience." While British viewers can still be shocked at the level of physical abuse that the good guys inflict on the bad, in America this, too, has long historical precedent. The Wickerman Commission reported to Congress in 1931 on the "third degree" in common use in police departments. "The sweat box," it explained, "is a cell to be heated until the prisoner is unable to endure it and will agree to answer as desired."

The programme opened with footage of a gun-toting police raid in Rio de Janeiro. In a city where 500 people are murdered each month, the police have long since decided that their war on crime shall be subject to no Geneva Convention. Extreme violence is their first degree. The episode ended with a British policeman lecturing a room of sceptical-looking Brazilian coppers on alternative techniques. "No matter how you look at it," he said, "people will talk to you more easily if you are nice to them." Tony Collins of the National Crime Facility explained: "We don't interrogate any more. We interview, and it is designed really to allow the suspect to put their side of the story." The alert detective presses for more and more details until contradictions begin to show.

The devil lay in Collins's words "any more". Given that this was a history documentary, the narration was too vague about when British police forsook the interrogation for the chat (if that really is always the case). It was not, obviously, before they had coerced false confessions out of the Guildford Four. Nor before internment in Northern Ireland in 1971 or the Emergency Provisions in the province of 1978. If America had the third degree, the Royal Ulster Constabulary had the "five techniques": hooding subjects and filling their ears with white noise; depriving them of sleep, food and drink; and making them stand in a fixed position for days on end.

But even if we took, re Ireland, the attitude of the Brazilian police towards organised crime, and said that anything went in war, interrogation was still a blind alley. As an ex-soldier, Fred Holroyd, said: "You can always get people to speak using these methods. Whether they tell you the truth is something completely different." A forced confession is a third-rate confession because you can never be certain if it is genuine. But then, how does anyone know when another human being is telling the truth? The lie detector (whose history provided another strand to this account) remains, after 80 years of use in US law, a deeply unconvincing instrument.

Want to pass the test? Before beginning, scrunch your toes or pinch yourself; your blood pressure immediately reaches an abnormal base level and confuses the machine.

What Catching the Killers relates is the attempt to turn detection, always a mixture of logical deduction and hunch, into a science. The opening programme, on DNA detection, showed how even that could backfire if the odds of a false match are not carefully considered, or if samples are contaminated. In fact, the greatest value of DNA testing may well be in proving not guilt but innocence: 89 north American prisoners have been freed as a result of appeals based on DNA testing. Suddenly the know-all forensic specialists of CSI: Crime Scene Investigation (Saturdays, 9pm, C5) look a bit less credible. Next week's programme deals with criminal profiling, a dubious science given credibility through the FBI agents Fox Mulder and Clarice Starling, as well as Fitz from Cracker. It will make them look like clairvoyants.

Tilman Remme's series contains all the usual cliches of crime documentaries, from bleached-out, blue-tint reconstructions to experts talking in front of bookcases. It is so low-key that you would not be surprised to stumble upon it one afternoon on the Discovery Channel, rather than in peak time.

Perhaps we will. But its subject, as all those detective writers know, is fascinating - in fact, more fascinating than much of the fiction it inspires.

Andrew Billen is a staff writer on the London Evening Standard

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