'Hold your whisht': Five things we learned from the first episode of Line Of Duty
Adrian Dunbar and Martin Compston in Line Of Duty.
Line of Duty (BBC One Sunday 9pm) finally re-appeared for Season 6, with talk that there might yet be a Season 7 on the cards. If this is all they got, then it might be time to call it a day. Here are five things we learned.
It all felt very familiar as we watched DI Kate Fleming in yet another new police department, at a meeting chaired by DCI Joanne Davidson, Kelly Macdonald to you and me. The official line is that Kate has left AC-12 because she is tired of ‘nicking coppers'.Or is that what the writers want us to believe, and really Kate is deep-undercover, investigating Davidson for deliberate use of an annoying Scottish accent?
Along with every other right-minded person, I love Kelly Macdonald and her lovely Scottish accent. But it looks like she was promised 70% of the dialogue in episode one, and that’s too much Scottish for anyone. During one scene, where she is co-ordinating an arrest at an apartment block, we have to listen to her talking for three minutes non-stop or at least it felt like that. The SWAT team went off the air for 30 seconds before emerging in balaclavas with the suspect, so obviously they swapped in the wrong guy, because this is Line of Duty, and they are obviously working for the Organised Crime Group (OCG). Or else this is a red herring, and they just paused to catch their breath because the apartment is on the fourth floor. The deja vu was up to 11 at this point.
Line of Duty is grumpier than ever, and no one is grumpier in Season 6 than DS Steve Arnott. We’re not sure why yet, but my guess is we’d all feel him after that amount of time in a three-piece suit. The problem is that Martin Compston, who plays Arnott, has a resting smiley face. A better actor might be able to hide that, but Martin isn’t a better actor, so there was a lot of him channelling a cranky teenager and not managing to pull it off. The result is that a lot of his scenes feel like clunky filler, when they might have been better off just flashing up a big red sign saying STEVE IS REALLY ANGRY.
A lot of episode one felt clunky. Here’s Kate looking suspicious FOR A LONG TIME. Here’s Steve buying codeine over the counter (What? Can you do that in the UK?). We’d be completely lost if Adrian Dunbar wasn’t so good as Superintendent Ted Hastings. I think he told Steve to ‘hold your whisht’ in one scene, which is really great. But they kept Ted in the office for most of episode one, peering out in his suspicious way. We need a lot more Ted to keep us interested.
The one truly startling moment is when Kate appears in a polo-neck that looks like a multi-coloured mushroom that grew on her. They should give that its own show. And let Line of Duty fade away.
