Line of Duty might be over, but Michael Taylor and Neil Summers are still delivering Music Therapy - even if Sunday nights won't be quite the same again for a while...
Did I watch Line of Duty last Sunday? No comment.
Monday nights are never going to be the same again. I’m really going to miss Line of Duty. Yes, you didn’t read that wrong. I’m one of those people who haven’t been glued to my telly on a Sunday night to hear Ted mutter about ‘bent coppers’ in pursuit of the mysterious H.
Because Neil and I are broadcasting professionals, our job is to bring and dispense the Music Therapy for the people who don’t need to know whether AC-12 have been done in by the OCG. I watch it on Mondays.
Or maybe you listen to us with the sound of the telly turned down. Trust me, that does work, though subtitles help when Ted Hastings begs of a suspect to answer the question for the sake of ‘Jesus, Mark, Joseph and the wee donkey’. If you had, that would have been the dulcet tones of Roxy Music’s More Than This you would have heard as he said it.
I have been watching Line of Duty since the start and I have to admit they certainly know how to crank up the tension and engage the audience in second guessing what’s going to happen next. I don’t share the negativity about how this last series ended either.
When Chloe had cracked the case - and revealed to the others that the supposed mastermind was bumbling Brummie DS Ian Buckles - the looks on the faces were priceless.
As was that of Buckles when in the interrogation room he finally broke his run of 34 consecutive ‘no comment’ responses to remind AC-12 who the muppets really were.
People were thinking how could Buckles be the evil mastermind, he’s so rubbish. He’s lazy, he cuts corners, he’s slack about his police work.
I say that’s exactly why he’s perfect for the rotten one, it’s not just that he’s corrupt, but his innate uselessness is why he is corruptible by organised criminals.
The disappointment for some people was that there wasn’t a shattering exposure of a dark and deep conspiracy.
What I think writer Ged Mercurio did instead was hold a mirror up to us all. Evil triumphs because of banal, everyday greed, not a dark knight or a puppet master pulling all the strings, but interconnected networks of stupid, greedy and rotten people who use one another to get what they want. They get away with it because so often we look for purity of evil, whilst holding to notions of a purity of virtue and goodness. I think we all know life isn’t really like that.
The greatest endings of long running TV series both had musical references at their very core.
The Wire playing out to the fragments of the lives of the surviving characters we’ve grown up with over five seasons as The Blind Boys of Alabama’s version of Tom Waits’ ‘Way Down in the Hole’ plays over the episode’s closing montage. Then there’s Don’t Stop Believing by Journey taking us to the dramatic ending of The Sopranos - something that people have analysed in universities.
As Ted, Kate and Steve descended in the lift from AC-12’s office, I would love to have had the bars of Talk Talk’s Such a Shame seeing them out. But it’s not over is it?
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