Summary
Law and Order: the legacy - 40 years ago, GF Newman's quartet of plays, Law & Order, provoked calls from MPs for the author to be arrested for sedition and the summoning of the director-general of the BBC to the Home Office to explain himself. The dramas explored the role of the Metropolitan Police, the criminal, the solicitor and the prison system around one central story. They provided a savage and uncompromising assessment of the criminal justice system, one in which corruption and stitch ups were common. Laurie Taylor considers the impact of those plays and the extent to which they created a public and political debate which produced positive reform. Four decades later, have we any cause for complacency? He's joined by the writer, GF Newman, Tim Newburn, Professor of Criminology at the LSE and Charlotte Brunsden, Professor of Film & Television Studies at the University of Warwick. Producer: Jayne Egerton.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Take some time for yourself with soothing classical music from the mindful mix, the Science of |
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| 0:29.8 | What is possibly the most truthful and hard-hitting British police series ever transmitted on television? |
| 0:38.0 | Find out. |
| 0:40.0 | Now if you're old enough to have been watching television assiduously back in the late 1970s, |
| 0:45.3 | you might remember that you had an evening choice of three rather different police dramas. |
| 0:51.4 | You might have opted for a version which largely portrayed the force as genial and sympathetic. Evening all, yes, Dixon of Dark Green, which was still on our screens in 1976, where it squatted with increasing incongruity alongside a drama |
| 1:16.1 | series which featured a run-down urban setting and a well an unsympathetic view of |
| 1:21.8 | some policemen. Yes, Z-Kars created by Troy Kennedy Martin, I can still picture Detective |
| 1:36.4 | Inspector Barlow and Detective Sergeant Watt, great double act. And if that |
| 1:40.6 | portrait of the police, for, well for all its social realism, still cast them as relatively |
| 1:45.6 | likable, there was always tougher stuff on the other channel. Yes, the Sweeney, Detective Sergeant George Carter in an all-action series which certainly |
| 2:05.2 | cast some of the police as less than lovable as prone to cutting corners and bending |
| 2:10.2 | laws. |
| 2:11.2 | But early in 1978, even this more critical approach to the police, this more complex view of the relationship between cops and robbers, was outdistanced, overtaken, some critics might say blown out of the water by a series of dramas |
| 2:26.0 | written by G.F. Newman and produced by Tony Garnett in which we were not so much shown the occasional |
| 2:31.4 | ways in which police and criminal behavior might overlap, we |
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