Why TV crime drama encourages us to treat the police with contempt

The one thing all modern TV crime series have in common – no matter where they’re made – is that anyone interviewed by detectives almost invariably behaves disrespectfully towards them. For instance, If they’re interviewed at home or at their workplace, the interviewee always carries on doing whatever they were doing before the cops showed up – the washing-up, painting a wall, operating machinery – while answering questions in a surly and desultory manner. One of these days, I swear, we’ll be treated to a suspect being quizzed while sitting on the lavatory.

I’m not the most patient person, and I’m pretty sure I couldn’t get through a day of such insulting responses without forgetting my own manners and taking a taser to one of the ill-mannered buggers (I’ll admit I probably wouldn’t have made a particularly good policeman).

The programme producers would probably claim that they’re merely reflecting what’s happening out there in the real world. Granted, chavs on council estates probably do behave like pigs on those rare occasions when a policeman ventures into their Heart of Urban Darkness – but, then, it’s hard to imagine a situation in which these people don’t behave like animals. The thing is that even the Oxford dons interviewed on Lewis tend to behave like surly teenagers off some South-East London sink estate.

Of course, the middle classes have fallen out of love with the police for the very good reason that the police have decided that we’re low-hanging fruit. We respect authority, we’re not violent, and we have the money to pay fines. (We also pay their wages, but that tends to slip their minds when it comes to the need to up conviction rates.) But despite the fact that we no longer feel the police are on our side, surely our innate good manners, the wish to avoid a scene, and our natural respect for authority make it unlikely we’d be quite as high-handed as we’re made to appear in TV dramas.

There are, I believe, a several reasons for the profusion of antagonistic TV police interviews.

Go back to Dragnet (DOM-DA-DOM-DOM!) or Dixon of Dock Green, when they couldn’t afford fancy sets or location filming, shooting schedules were tight, and cameras were huge, lumpy great things. Interrogation scenes tended to be static affairs taking place on the cop's turf: modern technology means most cop/interviewee dialogue take place on the latter's turf, which makes their rudeness and cockiness more believable.

Film editing techniques mean that audiences are now used to shots changing every few seconds, which is easier to achieve with antagonistic rat-a-tat dialogue.

Viewers were more willing to absorb long tranches of relatively emotionless dialogue back then, because we tended to be less emotionally incontinent – we hadn’t yet been taught that the natural response to any awkward question is to scream “You’re doing my head in!” (Eastenders has a lot to answer for).

There didn’t use to be 450 other channels to switch over to if the drama hit a quiet patch – if the choice was between Softly, Softly or Seaside Special, you’d probably have stuck with the former. Nowadays, our emotions have to be constantly stimulated in order to keep us glued to the channel we’re on.

On the whole, I’m not against any of these changes – you only have to watch an old episode of Kojak or Starsky & Hutch to realise how much better cop shows are now (there are some major exceptions, of course – in particular, The Sweeney).

But I do worry that the average viewer might mistake a dramatic device for reality. If what we see on TV does in fact represent reality, no wonder a third of our police are obese – if every member of the public I spoke to treated me with contempt, I’d be tempted to spend 100% of my time sitting behind a desk, filling out forms and munching donuts (the current mania for form-filling, I am reliably informed, has more to do with the police’s aversion to doing any real work than to unreasonable demands from the Home Office).

It’s interesting to note that in Martin Shaw’s 1960s-set ITV series George Gently, our hero – despite being a wet liberal – tends to respond to impertinence by slapping the face of whoever’s getting mouthy. And, of course, much of Det. Inspector Gene Hunt’s popularity stemmed from his refusal to take any crap from anybody. If we had a few modern TV cops doing the same – especially the “nice” ones – it might remind members of the public to keep a civil tongue in their heads.