Line of Duty

We critics never admit it but when we go out on a line we check whether other reviewers have done the same.

I criticised Grace last Sunday for its weak dialogue and acting .. .and so did other reviewers.

I found the new series of Line of Duty formulaic and heavily accented to police procedure.

It began promisingly with a high octane raid by armoured police on a flat supposedly occupied by a dangerous murderer.

However Jo Davidson (Kelly MacDonald) had an intuition that a parked van en route was involved in a theft of a bookies which derailed the initial raid and the plot.

Add to this the now familiar shots of police officers on the edge – one appeared to be addicted to Nurofen and Jo Davidson threw her glass of white wine after she split up with her colleague Faridi – plus hard-to-follow abbreviations of police procedure and protocol and the end could not come too soon.

I found myself yearning for the macho culture of The Sweeney and – before that – the warmth and common sense of George Dixon of Dock Green (Jack Warner) greeting the viewer from under the blue lamp.

More contemporaneously the Danish TV production of The Investigation succeeded in making routine police work and the conflicts in the team absorbing television which in the Line of Duty did not.