ABSTRACT

In contemporary Britain, it is a rare thing indeed for a week’s television schedule not to include several crime dramas in prime time. Cops, and other criminal investigators, seem always to be on the box. This collection makes a claim for the significance and distinctiveness of British television crime drama, offering original and insightful essays that reveal the sheer breadth of this popular genre on British screens. Crime dramas are some of the most viewed programmes in UK television, regularly appearing in the British Audience Research Board (BARB) Top 20 programmes. The genre’s contribution to the UK industry is also evident from the number of crime drama nominations in the 2015 British Academy of Film and Television Arts (BAFTA) awards including under the categories of Best Leading Actor, Best Leading Actress, Best Supporting Actor, Best Supporting Actress and Best Television Drama Series, Best Director (Fiction), Best Editing (Fiction), and Best Writer. Crime drama is one of British television’s longest-lasting, most popular forms, and one that has proved itself capable of numerous generic reinventions. It merits critical attention because it is one of the most important places where ideas of justice, transgression, retribution and civic life are represented and contested. Crime drama offers audiences stories of right and wrong, moral authority asserted and resisted, professionals and criminals, and does so in ways that are often highly entertaining, innovative and thought-provoking. For many television scholars (Corner, 1999; Ellis, 1999; Henderson, 2007; Newcomb and Hirsch, 1983), it is the medium’s responsiveness to the social world – its ability to bring the anxieties of public debate into the private realm of the home through both factual and fictional forms – that marks television’s unique purchase on the social world. The fictional narratives of television crime drama are not only entertaining, they also provide our culture with a place to explore social anxieties, new social relations and often deeply troubling instances of social breakdown and violence. Crime drama is a highly dynamic genre, responsive not only to changing social debates on crime and policing, but also to processes of hybridisation within the television industry itself. The rise of forensic crime dramas, ranging from home-grown series such as Silent Witness (1996-) and Waking the Dead (2000-11) to popular US imports such as CSI: Crime Scene Investigation (2000-15) and Bones (2005-), is testament to crime drama’s capacity to adopt and adapt elements of the medical drama to its

own generic concerns. In the United Kingdom, historical crime drama also holds considerable popular appeal, both as adaptations of literary classics such as Agatha Christie’s Poirot (1989-2013) and Miss Marple (1984-92), and as fictionalised accounts of detection set in the past such as Foyle’s War (2002-15), Inspector George Gently (2007-) and Grantchester (2014-). Nonetheless, a great deal of contemporary crime drama is based on the police procedural, a distinct form that aims to offer viewers a privileged insight into the daily workings of the police force. This subgenre allows for significant character development as we, the audience, get to know the police officers and their domestic as well as professional lives. However, the allure of the police procedural rests on its claim to authenticity delivered via the detailed procedures which emerge through the police investigation; the police procedural appeals through its seemingly democratic offer to take us, as viewers, inside a policing world that is largely remote and unknown to members of the public so that we too can get to know the system and how it works. It is simultaneously transgressive – crossing the thresholds of professional insider knowledge – and conservative, as it reinforces the privileged insights and authority of the police force. It is this tension which has been developed and exploited in many recent instances of the subgenre, such as Broadchurch (2013-), The Killing (2011-12) and Line of Duty (2012-).