At the time of writing, there was no way of knowing how Line of Duty will unfold.
Will Superintendent Ted Hastings, played by Adrian Dunbar, be revealed as criminal overlord H? Will the antidote finally be found to stop characters saying “OCG” every 20 seconds? Over on Sky Arts, a South Bank Show, featuring writer Jed Mercurio interviewed by Melvyn Bragg, looks interesting. I’ve long been impressed by Mercurio’s penchant for stuffing his dramas full of working-class talent.
In an era of full-blown cultural elitism, this feels like an important political statement. Vicky McClure (DI Kate Fleming) won a place at drama school, but couldn’t afford to go – how many Vicky McClures (or Martin Compstons or Stephen Grahams) are there out there? Then there’s Mercurio’s intriguing dramatic habit of making characters effectively gender-neutral. He writes great women because he depicts them getting on with their jobs and lives without being capital-F female.
While backstories, heartache and sexual tension feature when they matter, the female characters could be male and vice versa. Fleming and DS Steve Arnott (Compston) could swap sexes in scenes, doing and saying exactly the same thing, and no one would think it was odd. While much has been made of Mercurio’s violence, he doesn’t use female death to sex up his plots. Like the male characters, women tend to die because of their jobs and not because they’ve been throttled with their tights by a serial killer.
Mercurio attracts a lot of heat, not least from me (he should never have killed off Lindsay Denton), but he should also be congratulated for his decidedly anti-classist, anti-sexist approach to high-octane TV drama.
• Barbara Ellen is an Observer columnist
