tue 09/09/2025

police

Meet the Police Commissioner, Channel 4

The Big Society. Not to be confused with other Bigs: the Big Bang, Chill, Sleep, Easy, Lebowski, Fat Greek Wedding, Trouble in Little China etc. History records that David Cameron’s sizeable brainwave vaporised on impact with reality around the time...

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Microcosm, Soho Theatre

As glad as I am that you've chosen to read this review, I can't help thinking you'd get more kicks out of the Daily Mail's take on Microcosm at the Soho Theatre, if indeed there is one. Written by Matt Hartley, whose Sixty Five Miles won a Bruntwood...

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Prey, ITV

"Policeman wrongly accused of murder" is possibly not history's most original story idea, but in Prey, writer (and TV debutant) Chris Lunt has turned it into a platform for a skilfully-controlled thriller that keeps your brow sweaty and your breath...

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Vera, Series 4, ITV

She drinks beer, drives a Land Rover and can never remember the names of her sidekick’s wife and daughter: welcome to the offbeat world of Vera Stanhope, deliciously imagined by writer Ann Cleeves and actor Brenda Blethyn. ITV’s Sunday night cop...

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Line of Duty, Series 2 Finale, BBC Two

If nothing else, this second series of Jed Mercurio's brutalist police thriller has done wonders for Keeley Hawes. Not that she was in much need of a career pick-me-up, but the way her haunted portrayal of the much-abused DI Lindsay Denton has...

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The Miners' Strike and Me, ITV

Thirty years ago this month, the National Coal Board announced the closure of 20 pits that were deemed "uneconomic", a decision which would incur the loss of 20,000 jobs. Arthur Scargill, president of the National Union of Mineworkers, responded by...

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True Detective, Sky Atlantic

You could boil down the content of this new HBO import to an info-bite that reads "two detectives hunt serial killer in Louisiana", but that wouldn't give you the faintest inkling of the pace, mood or texture of what's shaping up as a remarkable...

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DCI Banks, ITV

Mothers and their sons provided the framework for the latest story involving DCI Alan Banks, the character on whom ITV is pinning its hopes to fill the vacancy of the nation’s favourite detective now that Frost and Morse are no more. Peter Robinson’...

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Inspector George Gently, Series 6, BBC One

“I like it when you’re a bastard,” George Gently growled at his sidekick, halfway into the first episode of this sixth series set in 1960s Northumberland, reassuring us that the partnership is very much back on when all appeared to be lost the last...

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Silent Witness, BBC One

Such is the level of confidence that the Silent Witness producers have in their new ensemble that star turn Emilia Fox barely lifted a scalpel in the latest instalment of the BBC’s long-running crime series. Either that or she needed a night or two...

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The Great Train Robbery - a Robber's Tale, BBC One

We've already been casting a revisionary eye over Lord Lucan, the Cold War, the Kennedy assassination and the Profumo affair. Last year Sheridan Smith portrayed Mrs Ronnie Biggs for ITV, but what took them so long to get around to the Great Train...

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Sifting the Evidence: the Great Train Robbery, 50 Years On

There’s a wonderful moment in Bruce Reynolds’s autobiography when he describes what became of his mate, a fellow train robber who had fled to Canada but was hunted down by the enigmatic Tommy Butler. Four and a half years after the Great Train...

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