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Andrew Billen - Good cop, bad cops
Published 21 November 2005
Television - A secret unit tackles police corruption and a dodgy script, writes Andrew Billen
The Ghost Squad (Channel 4)
There is nothing in the world, said George Dixon in one of his Saturday-night homilies to the nation, as rotten as a bent cop. However, since Sergeant Dixon retired in 1976 - a year, incredibly, after the first series of The Sweeney aired - dramatists have found nothing else as interesting. From Serpico to The Shield, coppers on the make have been central to the stories we want told about our law enforcers. Our interest, as Robert Browning wrote, is not in the black and white but in the dangerous edge of things, that "giddy line midway". In 1992, the BBC had considerable success with Between the Lines, centred on the Metropolitan Police Complaints Investigation Bureau and its morally dubious (at least as regards his sex life) lead detective Tony Clark, played by Neil Pearson.
Something like this bureau, a secret undercover unit investigating police corruption, really operated out of Wanstead, London, between 1994 and 1998, before being closed after complaints about its tactics. Or was it closed? There are officers, apparently, who believe to this day that the Independent Police Complaints Commission still runs a secret squad of snoops infiltrating dodgy police forces. If they are right, then Tom Grieves, creator of The Ghost Squad, has done the unit a big favour by inventing a drama so unbelievable that it discredits the very idea.
The first episode (15 November, 10pm) set up the eight-part series with the death in a police interview room (well, it makes a change from a cell) of a young drug dealer. Rakesh didn't seem to be a bad sort as drug dealers go, flirting and joshing with his arresting officer, Amy Harris. But compared with most of the policemen, he was Mr Personality. Amy's boss, Bryce, is a sexist lech. Her colleague, Surridge, is a racist. "Cheeky little Paki fuck," he said of Rakesh, before correcting himself: "Oh yes, he's a charming ethnic minority who's rightfully allowed to express himself."
But when Amy returned to question him, Rakesh was in his death throes and vomited up a lungful of blood over her nice white blouse. There was no Harry Hill to pop up and say, "You've been framed", but that was what was happening to Amy. Minutes later the Ghost Squad swooped on the police station and "locked it down". "I don't care if your mother's got cancer or you miss the birth of your baby boy. Nobody goes in. Nobody goes out." The dialogue, as you can tell, is so on the nose that it breaks it every ten minutes.
If the coppers are locked down, so are we, the viewers. The action does not stray from outside the police station's walls until the very end. It should feel tense and claustrophobic, but mainly it feels boring. For a while I wondered if Grieves was attempting to do something new with the corruption genre and look at the effects of an internal investigation from the viewpoint not of the investigating force but of the investigated. But the suspect policemen and women in this episode were so loathsome that you wanted them all to lose their jobs.
The only non-rotten apple is Amy. Plucky, bright and pretty, and not to be bullied, she quickly sets about setting up those who would set her up. She is helped by finding that Rakesh's murder has been recorded on his mobile phone. (Lazily, a secret recording provides an important plot point in the next episode, too.) When the time comes, she shops her mates. "You did good, even if you fucked up your career in the process," says Baldy, one of the senior Ghost Squadders. (The language in the programme is bad in both senses.) "What will you do now?"
What she does now, and apologies if you are ahead of me, is to join the Ghost Squad. We next see her at the offices of Albany Grass (HQ in The Man From UNCLE was a tailor's shop) about to be recruited by Carol McKay, played icily by Emma Fielding. "It's unpopular work, but it's vital," she explains, in case we have not got the message.
On her first operation, Amy infiltrates a police undercover team that has, in turn, infiltrated an Albanian outfit smuggling sex workers. The next week, she investigates a police sergeant gone bad who may be sleeping with the teenage runaways he arrests. The stories are not bad, but the telling of them is stilted and manages to be either over-obvious or overcomplicated. And the casting is dull.
The series aims for an atmosphere of hazard-ous moral relativity, and Amy spends a lot of time castigating herself in the traditional manner for her misjudgements ("Fuck! Shit! Shit!"). But Elaine Cassidy, who was sweet as the heiress Maud in Fingersmith, is landed with bitterly sarcastic lines she is too young to pull off. To be fair, maybe no one could. The directors are interested in watching her get undressed as often as possible and Amy thoughtfully wears a frock of extreme decolletage for a date with her lover, a married high-up at Scotland Yard. But, fully clothed, Cassidy is not yet strong enough as a character actress to distract us from the workmanlike script she has been landed with.
How different the enterprise could have been had it been made by Tony Garnett, the man behind Between the Lines. Garnett would have made us believe that these ghosts exist.
Andrew Billen is a staff writer on the Times
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