A SHORT HISTORY & BACKGROUND

  
  This is not really a cop show at all. Perhaps, but incidentally. it is certainly not about solving crimes or catching villains.

Think of the police as a handy way into what the show is really about. (There is an old Hollywood maxim - a movie should never be about what it's about - which I wish I had known in my early, didactic years).

The setting is urban but in a small enough patch for the audience to get to know and carry in its heart. We are not fighting crime in an anonymous metropolis. Nor following the bobby in Ruritania. It's just a town in the middle of an endless conurbation.

A show which could become a State of the Nation series without ever immodestly claiming anything so grand. A show which creeps up on the audience but, with luck, will have a cumulative impact.

We go out into the community with the police, live there with them and use their unique perspective to witness just how our society is working - or not.

We will see problems, but propose no solutions. In most cases we will explode most solutions as simplistic and based on ignorance of peoples actual experience. We will see that most problems - and crimes - are beyond the reach of the police. That we expect too much of the police and scapegoat them in our disappointment.

But the problems won't go away.
Most of the time not much happens. Just the everyday, rather than the dramatically exceptional.
On the surface we aim to be entertaining. Make 'em laugh, even make 'em cry.
The deeper purpose of the show will emerge in time.
The style is 'being there'. What is on the screen actually happened and a camera was around to make a record of it. And here it is. That's the conceit, the little game the audience is in on.

It used to be called The Willing Suspension of Disbelief.

Tony Garnett






 
   
 



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