UK Edition
Police dramas have been 'done to death' says writer of new BBC police drama
Police dramas have been “done to death” by television, according to Sir David Hare, whose latest project happens to be a BBC thriller about a detective investigating a murder.
Collateral, starring Carey Mulligan, is Sir David’s first original television series and brings him back to the corporation 40 years after his work on Play for Today.
Mulligan plays a detective who investigates the fatal shooting of a pizza delivery man.
But Sir David, the Oscar-nominated screenwriter and acclaimed playwright, said Collateral had little in common with other police shows and would not feature any cliches of the genre.
The BBC is currently showing Hard Sun, a drama about two detectives who discover that the apocalypse is imminent, which comes hard on the heels of Luther, Happy Valley and Line of Duty.
Speaking at a BFI screening of Collateral, Sir David said: “I’m trying very hard not to do police procedural throughout. There are no computers. There are absolutely no whiteboards on which Pentel names are written with arrows going off them. There is absolutely none of all that.
“Because although I extravagantly admire Line of Duty - I think it’s fantastic - I do nevertheless feel that police procedural is a genre about which there is nothing to add. It has been done to death.
“I’m trying to make the police like people. They are completely normal people, and there isn’t any of that police attitudinising.” Sir David also specified “no flashing blue lights, but it finally became impossible”.
Collateral, which begins next month on BBC Two, delves into the world of illegal immigration, with a fictional removal centre based on the controversial Yarl’s Wood in Bedforshire. It features Establishment cover-ups, with the church, the Army and Parliament all coming under scrutiny.
Sir David said: “The minute I started writing about illegal immigration, the BBC became frenzied because obviously it’s a hugely important subject and - in fiction at least - nobody has written about it on television.
“So the whole thing was fast-tracked, for which I thank the BBC very much although it put everybody else under huge pressure, in order to have something on screen on this subject by February.”
The production was also under time pressure because Mulligan was pregnant during filming.
The pregnancy was written into the storyline, but Mulligan said she was pleased that it was not the main focus. She said: “No pregnancy talk was allowed. She’s a working woman, she just gets through it.”
Piers Wenger, the BBC’s head of drama, has previously defended the number of police procedurals on television.
He described Collateral as “a contemporary and thought-provoking state-of-the-nation thriller that pushes the boundaries of what audiences expect.”