I know we’re all supposed to take Ross Kemp terribly seriously now that he has reinvented himself as an investigative journalist and presenter of Serious Documentaries but – it’s hard. It’s hard for people of my generation to put out of our minds his decade in EastEnders, having scenery moved round him while he approximated emotion by turning his tiny head red with rage and/or sorrow. The 90s were an odd time, children. We engaged in many collective delusions, the foremost being that Britannia was cool, but the secondmost being that two men who looked like they were built out of peanuts and had heads like hair bobbles were convincing hardcases. And it’s hard to forget that it was this collective delusion that made him the top choice for the documentary about the effect of gang warfare on Britain – Ross Kemp on Gangs – which won a Bafta in 2010 and set him on his new career path. It’s harder still to imagine that he – rather than his producers – finds, researches and sets up the perilous situations he, uh, investigates (via the likes of Ross Kemp in Afghanistan, Ross Kemp in Search of Pirates, Ross Kemp: Battle for the Amazon, titles written in letters of fire and testosterone) rather than being parachuted in just before the cameras start rolling.
Here we were In the Line of Fire With Ross Kemp. It followed the usual format. A weighty subject. In this case, the rise of knife and gun crime in the UK. Explained in short, staccato sentences. By our man. The big question posed. Should we. Arm our police? Ross Kemp. Follows some police. To find out. With exclusive access. To things. Periodically.
He meets officers attacked in the line of duty who gamely re-enact confrontations for him, supplemented with footage of the real event from body-cam recordings. There is always a supreme injustice at work here, which is that real-life footage of something you know must have been terrifying for those involved, doesn’t look nearly as convincing or dramatic as … well, what you see on the telly. We’ve been ruined for true bravery, true drama, true everything, by the heightened pitch of fiction. Thus the people who have faced down drug-crazed men wielding butcher’s knives or been threatened with a replica gun assumed to be real don’t quite get their due. Kemp may assure us in voiceover (or covert whisper if he is being allowed to tag along) that “This is as serious as it gets,” but the thought inescapably occurs that you will have to take his word for that. Footage of one officer, Rob from Northamptonshire police, stabbed through the femoral artery (“I thought he’d given me a playground dead leg at first”) and in imminent danger of bleeding out, directing his own treatment in the field (“Stand on it,” he ordered calmly but firmly, “stand on it”), was the exception.
Kemp pads out his activities with a visit to the new military-style training course on which some armed officers are now sent and plays the role of hostage in one of their tactical drills. For those who like watching this kind of thing – doors being blown off (sorry, “dynamic entry”), things going flash-bang and men roaring over suspected terrorist figures to “establish domination” – this is the kind of thing they like.
Beneath the flash-bangery, however, were the officers’ answers to the question of whether we should give up our status as the last unarmed constabulary and start policing by force instead of consent. Most acknowledge, with sadness and regret, the need for some increase in weapons training and carrying. But most did not want to be part of it. All those attacked pointed out that if they had been armed, their attacker would quite likely be dead, rather than imprisoned or detained for their mental health. Our way, the consensus was clear, is better.
It was a message in almost direct contradiction to the tone of the rest of the programme, and you could practically feel everyone involved in its making longing to find one – just one! – boy or girl in blue who was jonesing for full battle kits on every corner, but they managed to resist the temptation to find one and thus misrepresent the narratively inconvenient truth they had found. Nice. One. Lads.
