In a lecture reprinted in the Guardian on 30 October, David Hare spoke of his astonishment at the reaction of an American friend to a performance of The Permanent Way, his unexpectedly enthralling play about the privatisation of British Rail. The moved New Yorker exclaimed: "You never told me you'd written a play about Aids."
I wonder if someone will come up to Declan Croghan, writer and creator of Murder Prevention (Saturdays, 10.20pm), and congratulate him on writing a six-part allegory of the Iraq war. Ostensibly about a unit of the Metropolitan Police set up not to solve murders but intervene before they occur, the series can legitimately be read as a symbol of the perils of pre-emptive action on the world stage: motives may be good, but outcomes are uncertain and the means are highly dubious.
The idea of pre-emptive policing has already been explored in Steven Spielberg's Minority Report, in which the police of 2054 were tipped off by a Jacuzzi-full of "precogs" who shuddered and yelped in sympathy with victims of yet-to-be-committed crimes. It was brilliant stuff but, as quite often, the science fiction was not so much predictive as descriptive. Within Scotland Yard there is, apparently, already a Homicide Prevention Unit (formerly the Murder Suppression Unit), an outfit secretive enough to have called off talks with Murder Prevention's producer at a very early stage - a decision, considering the programme's take on its work, that it may now be regretting.
Croghan's idea is a smart one, combining the concepts of a stand-alone police unit (Waking the Dead), psychological profiling (Cracker), forensic policing (CSI) and gadgetry (Mission: Impossible) with the (almost) new one of pre-emptive detection. The police unit, headed by the tough-minded Irishman DCI Patrick Goddard (Conor Mullen), includes cops from each of the above disciplines. In episode two, the script even risks a joke about the viewer's familiarity with them. The forensics woman, having failed to nail a suspect, complains that he is "forensically aware": "I blame all those cop shows giving away our secrets."
The initial episodes concentrate on two potential murderers. The first, naturally, is a paedophile. Newly released from prison, he has volunteered as a coach for the local boys' soccer team. Suspect two is a stalker who has been spying on a female neighbour and sniffing her knickers at the launderette. In a line that draws blood from reality television, his solicitor explains away his videotapes by saying he wants to be a documentary film-maker.
Yet the real subject is not the future killers but the doubtful means by which they are investigated. In the course of the first three episodes, the team poses as a posse of Transco gas-leak spotters to gain entry to a house, injects an illegal and dangerous "truth" serum into a suspect, emotionally blackmails a suicidal witness into giving a statement and beats up another baddy, who is dumped in a drawer in a hospital morgue. Most shocking of all, a bent-nosed copper called Maurice, played wonderfully by the comic actor Michael Smiley (from Spaced), "befriends" the emotionally and physically vulnerable mother of the paedophile. When this meek woman discovers who Maurice really is, she asks: "What are you made of, fucking stone?"
Her son's flat beneath Spitalfields Market carries a visual echo of the Murder Prevention Unit's own cavernous, morgue-like premises - as if within both basements lurk dark, subterranean motives. Abu Ghraib, I say. Above ground, meanwhile, the stalker's supposed victim takes an overdose and thus ends up nearer death than before the pre-emption started. Iraq.
It is gripping television, the best drama Five has made. As is to be expected from Tony Garnett's World Productions, which made Buried and The Cops, the filming is distinctive and its producer, Eleanor Greene, has learned from Garnett to put as much care into the casting. Tilly Vosburgh as Carole Cullen, the paedophile's mother, shows how the right actress can lift a programme by a painstakingly naturalistic performance. Equally, the green, nervy public-schoolboy profiler Mark, played by Tom Brooke, is an unexpected recruit to a cop series.
But there have also been compromises with mainstream genre drama, and the most disappointing is the presence of an over-the-top maverick. Ray (Mark Lewis Jones) does something so bad in the second programme (6 November) that he spends the last minutes of it washing away his sins under a shower as we intercut between the bathroom and a Catholic church where another copper's children are singing in the choir. It is a pity. The evil potential of pre-emptive policing is strong enough not to need seasoning with a maniacal carbon copy out of The Shield (a Five import).
Murder Prevention would not have been possible without Steve Bochco's Hill Street Blues and NYPD Blue. Thus it is with sadness that I report the latter's decline into madness in its final series, now showing in the US. Detective Sipowitz has been joined by the ghost (I'm not joking) of his old partner Simone. Normally, I would not spoil the plot of a series yet to be shown over here, but Channel 4 has more or less given up on NYPD Blue and transmits it, years late, after midnight. I had thought this a mistake.
Andrew Billen is a staff writer on the Times
