ABSTRACT
It is necessary, therefore, to start by saying a little about the context into which Jimmy McGovern has made his most recent (at the time of writing) interventions into the crime genre. In the early 1990s McGovern made a significant contribution to the shift in the crime genre towards agents of detection outside the police themselves through the introduction of the forensic psychologist, Edward Fitzgerald (Robbie Coltrane) in Cracker (ITV, 1993-2007). McGovern’s return to explicit questions of law and order in Accused and Common comes in the context of a range of work shown on British television that has the detective’s role inscribed at the core of our interest, either through their name being the title – Wallander, Scott and Bailey, Lewis and Vera – or where the critical attention is so firmly on the individual that The Killing may as well be called Lund or The Bridge, Saga and Martin. The range of this list of central characters that have tended to dominate British television screens in recent years is, admittedly, much more
extensive than once would have been the case. It is therefore now much less tenable to claim, as the BFI’s Screenonline site still does, that ‘the television image of the police is still dominated by the traditional male sleuth in a suit, sometimes avuncular, sometimes grumpy’ (Delaney, 2014).
