Amazon.co.uk Review
It's grim up North for the cops in
The Cops, the BBC's answer to ITV's long-running police drama series
The Bill. Bolton, Lancashire doubles for the fictional Northern town of Stanton; Bolton's not such a bad place in reality, but here it looks like war-torn Beirut. Unlike their soft Southern counterparts, the cops in Stanton swear copiously, get involved in fistfights and generally behave badly. Little wonder when you contemplate the grim reality of their daily round among all the "dirty, thieving, lying scumbags" they have to deal with (both criminals and their police colleagues). Series one opens as it means to continue with probationary PC Mel Draper snorting cocaine in a club before dashing off to start her beat. Among a plethora of other strong characters there's tough-but-vulnerable WPC Natalie; Roy the grizzled old-fashioned bobby who's as sick of the namby-pamby modern police force as he is of the criminal "scumbags"; an ineffectual Chief Super who talks in PR-speak ("facilitating proactive client-orientated policing"); and a new Sergeant fresh from the Met with a complicated history of his own. Sex, crime and drugs prove to be a potent combination--and that's just within the police station!
This is soap opera masquerading as documentary, shot in subjective fly-on-the-wall fashion and with semi-improvised dialogue that enhances the documentary feel. There's no hummable theme tune and every episode leaps without preamble in media res into the thick of the action. The result is a show with all the character-driven tension of a soap combined with the voyeurism and unpredictability of docudrama. It's an original combination that makes for compulsive viewing. --Mark Walker
Synopsis
The entire series one on four cassettes.
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