“Some people don’t trust us. They think we have trigger-happy meatheads on the team,” says Liz Garvey, master of the Metropolitan police force’s public image, to a copper who’s shot an unarmed member of the public dead in a kebab shop. I’ll give Babylon (Thursday, 10pm, Channel 4) this: it’s got some pluck. Although we’re now eight months further from the last IRL high-profile police-influenced death than when its pilot aired in February, to have the innards of an innocent civilian strewn over a central plot is pretty frigging brave.
For those who missed it first time round, Babylon is a Danny Boyle-exec-produced police-procedural drama comedy – or popoprocedramedy, to use the correct televisual term – which divvies its attention equally between three groups within the Met: the lads-on-tour firearms banter tank, one of whom is quietly going crackers over his brain matter/burger sauce mishap; a handful of the Territorial Support Group (riot police to you and me); and in City Hall, chief constable Richard Miller and Garvey, who has a finger in each layer of police PR pie while simultaneously refreshing the “raw public opinion” feed on her Tweetdeck. And to think, it’s all to keep us lot from eyeing up pitchforks with intent. “Bottom line: is it a riot?” asks the head of private prison firm Securamax as staff officer Tom Oliver and deputy commissioner Charles Inglis survey real-time footage of what looks a lot like a prison riot. “Well, it’s a disturbance. It’s definitely a disturbance,” says Tom to the crack of broom on spine. “In my opinion, what we’re looking at here is a severe disturbance.”
The occult language of spin is the least of Garvey’s problems, though, as she realises she’s probably spent a bit too much of her life swotting up on TED talks and not quite enough developing “outside interests”. “No, she’s fine, she’s nice,” says the best approximation of a friend she has. I don’t like to think of my spin doctors as real people – some kind of highly efficient cyborg with a computer voice, which would short circuit if you spilled your coffee over it, is a much more reassuring image – but ouch at overhearing that from a toilet cubicle. If ever you’re described in a way that reluctantly clumps the words “no”, “fine” and “nice” together like the awkward first arrivals at a wake, full sobbing is totally permitted, and a good sit down and think about where you’re going in life strongly encouraged. Garvey, in the event, takes it like a trooper, which makes the rising sexual tension between her and Miller – a dubious reptile fully deserving of special, narrow-eyed suspicion – all the more confusing.
It’s probably just as well that Garvey has got a youth offenders’ riot – or “disturbance”, or “incident”, or “a few thousand wrong ’uns raring to batter seven shades of you-know-what out of each other” – to take her mind off it. At Cravenwood YOI, negotiations are taking place. “The message I have is that they wish to speak to Holly Willoughby,” says a prison guard over the radio, and smarmy Finn relays that Joey Barton has tweeted his offer to act as intermediary. “We’ll send in some pizzas,” tuts the top rozzer on the scene. “Not stuffed crust, that’s taking the piss.”
It’s impossible to make something as current and pertinent as this apolitical, but Babylon pulls a clever move in never actually making it clear which side of the fence it occupies. Instead, it holds a mirror up to operations and shows that there’s – wait for it guys – two sides to every story. Opinions of the police, real and fictional, will always be divided. On one hand you have the argument they’re heroes to protect and serve us like they do. On the other you have the families of Mark Duggan and Ian Tomlinson. Robbie in particular – the violently passionate TSG member who’s now in charge of a gun – is a bit of a worry, so for writers Sam Bain and Jesse Armstrong to make him as likable as a naughty airedale terrier is some kind of witchcraft. “They say, ‘No anchovies,’” crackles the radio again, “or someone will lose their finger.”
