Nothing but the Truth:Line of Duty S1.

"I swear to tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth" - the solemn oath usually given in UK court rooms.

Way, way after everyone else, I am finally catching up on Line of Duty (on the iPlayer - it was originally on BBC2 but switched to BBC1 by the fourth series such was its popularity) and, of course, its excellent. You know when people whose values and tastes you trust tell you that stuff is good and you're, for some reason, initially cynical about that? You're almost always wrong aren't you? The things the people you trust say are good are, more often than not, good.

Your friends aren't trying to deceive you. They're trying to share things they love with you. That cynicism, which I have definitely been guilty of in the past, isn't the reason I didn't watch Line of Duty when it began back in 2012 though. The main reason, and it's quite an overwhelming one really, is that I didn't have a working television between summer 2011 and summer 2014 (this was actually quite a good thing as it forced me to do other stuff, it's not an experience I'd have wished to repeat during lockdown). 

I also suspected it might be like The Bill or maybe a police version of Casualty. More soap opera than drama. I've nothing against soap operas (as anyone who remembers witnessing me reciting the names of actors in Coronation Street, Eastenders, Brookside, and Emmerdale Farm back in the late 80s/early 90s will verify) but I've done my shift at the soap opera coalface and I now crave something different.

Line of Duty, now six seasons deep and with viewing figures that have gone from under three million per episode to over fifteen million, isn't necessarily that different. But it's not exactly what I expected either and it is, undoubtedly - even after just one series, great. It's tense, it's suspenseful, it's tightly plotted, full of well developed characters with intricate back stories, and the actors that play those characters are uniformly brilliant at all times.

When a police raid on a flat in a tower block goes horrendously wrong a cover story is immediately concocted by Chief Inspector Philip Osborne (Owen Teale) and everyone involved agrees to go along with it. An innocent man has been killed but the police are closing ranks and protecting their own. All except one. DS Steve Arnott (Martin Compston), an intense individual of strong moral fibre, refuses to play along and his moral stance brings him to the attention of Superintendent Ted Hastings (Adrian Dunbar), head of the AC-12 anti-corruption team.

Hastings recruits Arnott and puts him, almost immediately, on the case of DCI Tony Gates (Lennie James), a Jag driving wide boy with the gift of the gab and a southern accent who has recently won an Officer of the Year award for his clean up figures. Suspiciously high figures according to Hastings:- "no-one's that good".

Gates is suspected of 'laddering' (attributing numerous different charges to the same defendant to increase his number of successful cases) and when he absentmindedly accepts a free breakfast from a local cafe for apprehending a mugger it's an excuse for AC-12 to take him and give his collar a gentle, at first, feel.

As Hastings and Arnott investigate Gates from the outside, DC Kate Fleming (Vicky McClure), an AC-12 member, is embedded in Gates's teams of 'lads'. His best mate DC Nigel Morton (Neil Morrissey with a walking cane), DI Matthew, or 'Dot', Cottan (Craig Parkinson), and DC Deepak Kapoor (Faraz Ayub) are all working with Gates on a double murder case that looks to have been the result of a turf war between rival gangs of drug dealers.

Gates is clearly a skilled performer but he's distracted by developments in his affair with Jackie Laverty (the always brilliant Gina McKee), a wealthy owner of a property holding company who has caused an accident drunk driving, fled the scene, and is now asking Gates to cover up for her. A request he vacillates over, to potentially his own detriment, for the bulk of the series.

As Laverty's behaviour and dealings are revealed more fully, and with that Gates complicity in protecting her, Line of Duty S1 opens up to reveal a complex web of organised crime, both at street and white collar levels, laundering, drug dealing, people being called 'slags' on Facebook, and even, it seems, terrorism and murder.   

Lennie James is superb as Gates. Cocksure and slightly chauvinistic on the surface, we witness his fingers wobble over a keyboard mouse, we see his uncertain stares and furtive glances, and in these moments he conveys to us that he is fully aware of how precarious the tightrope he is walking on is, and how dangerous it would be if he were to fall.

Even when he proudly applauds his young daughters at their school piano recitals, reads them bedtime stories, or plays What's the Time, Mr Wolf? with them, his mobile phone is a constant itch in his pocket. The news he waits for via text is rarely good and in what I believe, if social media memes are anything to go by, is something of a regular trick with Line of Duty, vital information for the viewer is often imparted partially. 

It's television made for the pause button or the ten second rewind as we try to interpret whispered conversations and decipher messages on phone screens or scraps of paper. It works brilliantly to create an atmosphere where suspicion is rife, loyalty, lust, and sense of duty are exploited, and age, sex, race, and rank are all weaponised as cop goes against cop in partitioned window office, escalator, or bar room.

You'd say paranoia was the order of the day if the things our chief protagonists were losing sleep over weren't real and fundamental to their lives. Offices liaise surreptitiously in underpasses, graveyards, and car parks, conveying information from window to window, and a backdrop of grey streets, feral kids on sink estates harassing pensioners and those with learning difficulties, laddish culture, narcotics, dead rodents deposited in cars, chopped off fingers, slit throats, and drug dealers hanged from lampposts manages to feel both outlandishly, even occasionally unrealistically, dangerous and very very British at the same time.

The language of slags, pillocks, bean counters (AC-12 to some other coppers), bent bastards, and chavs may not be the most erudite form of expression but it reflects, accurately, how people in this country actually speak. Earthy language gives way to genuinely shocking moments, I jumped out of my skin more than once, and the odd truly chilling scene.

We see Hastings try to slow down, manage, and almost father the over enthusiastic and monomaniacal Arnott, tightening the lead of his freshly converted attack bulldog but still utilising his threat to get the job done. This dynamic, and the one between Arnott and Fleming - there were some lingering looks and a cruel lie about Fleming performing fellatio on Gates that Morton told to Arnott left a bad taste in his mouth, will surely be played out in more depth in the next five seasons and I shall be watching all of them very soon.

For season one, it was a bit like starting a new job. Almost too many faces to remember, or at least match to names. There was Jools, Gates' wife (Kate Ashfield), drug dealer Wesley Duke (Dylan Duffus), and sink estate residents Terry (Elliot Rosen), Keeley Pilkington (Lauren O'Rourke) and her son Ryan (Gregory Piper) as well as waitress, and potential love interest for Arnott, Nadzia (Elisa Lasowski) on civvy street and there were as many police as you'd expect a quiet vigil to mark the death of a murdered woman on Clapham Common.

I don't know if DCI Alice Prior (Heather Craney), DS Leah Janson (Claire Keelan), DI Ian Buckells (Nigel Boyle), PC Simon Bannerjee (Neet Mohan), PC Karen Larkin (Fiona Boylan), or CS Derek Hilton (Paul Higgins) will be returning in later series of Line of Duty (or, for that matter, Alison Lintott as nervous civilian police investigator Rita) so I'll give them all a namecheck now because they were all great.

Greater still were the stars, Dunbar, Arnott, McClure, and Lennie James, and the direction of both David Caffrey and Douglas MacKinnon. Perhaps most credit should go to Sisters of Mercy fan Jed Mercurio for creating and writing Line of Duty in the first place. When it started in 2012 very few of us could have imagined what a piece of appointment TV it would go on to become for millions but even by the time series one ends, with those neat little captions you get in real life crime dramas that tell us what became of those involved afterwards as well as a massive set up for series two, you feel you're entering into a world that could become something of an obsession and that is, I suppose, hardly a surprise. We're fascinated, as people, by both criminals and law officers. Bent coppers give us all that in one handy package. Woop-woop! That's the sound of da police! That's the sound of the beast!