“Jenny Jenny Jenny,” sings Francis Jones, ex-boxer and CEO of Sparta Security softly, “oh Jenny!” Modelling themselves on the fearsome and noble army of ancient Sparta, Francis and his team fight petty crime, patrol the streets and strike terror into the hearts of the north-east’s burglars, moped fans and common or garden wrong ’uns. Today he has set up a meeting with Jenny Chapman MP to inform her that he’s the man to solve Darlington’s moped problem, an encounter entertainingly chronicled on new observational documentary Rent A Cop (Thursday, 10.30pm, BBC3).
Jenny looks concerned, but she needn’t be worried. In his undertakings as the security Don Dada of Darlington, Francis will go undercover at moped ground zero, take candid photos of the offenders and then knock on their doors, suggesting they pack it in. He won’t have any need to go to any of the less reasonable weapons in his arsenal. Sparta Security offers all sorts: bully watch, anti-petrol siphoning measures, or perhaps you’d prefer the sniper service, where someone will dress up as a bush and stake out your house, should anyone look as if they’re about to nip round the back and go for your Xbox.
Clearly, antisocial behaviour and its symbolic embodiment – the moped – are causing a lot of trouble in Darlington. Someone from one of the areas Francis patrols, who remains anonymous, tells him about the hell he’s living through in a digitally disguised voice. “They tear around on mopeds,” he affirms. Francis takes a deep breath and looks to the heavens. ‘Why, God?” he seems to ask. “Why have ye forsaken the Skinner Park Estate?” You see, Francis is a born-again Christian and he and the Big Boss Man are tight. “Directed by God, Managed by Jesus” is printed on Sparta’s business cards. This sense of Christian morality is what drives Francis to protect the people of Darlington. It inspires him to build a large business and to promote it with flyers featuring a paramilitary crime fighter in a balaclava, a crime fighter who’s pointing a gun at you at the same time as sharing a very robust message about consideration for the environment.
Francis is a great marketeer, but his practice does raise some questions. Does the presence of licensed vigilantes on estates, looking for youths whizzing around on vehicles with the horsepower of a hairdryer, create unnecessary fear? Does that presence antagonise the lawless teens, whom we see buzzing along at 15mph, fags in mouths, casually flicking the cameraman the Vs? We may never know as, over the course of this eight-part series, Francis gets the full, BBC3-patented comi-genial treatment. Francis is an enigma, and there is much more to him than Rent A Cop lets us see. “What are you fighting, Francis?” I find myself begging the screen. “Moped outlaws, or a darkness within yourself?!?” To get to the heart of this strange man, Francis needs a more sombre treatment: lingering shots of him looking bleakly over an industrial estate, or philosophising about lasses’ arses as he slo-mo kisses a rosary. Instead, he gets a lighthearted Black Eyed Peas soundtrack as he and his sidekick/mentee Luke “Pembow” Pemberton Keystone Cop it around their jurisdiction.
Pembow is a show in himself: a man who appears to be the result of having time-machined someone from the past to the present day before spinning them round a few times, taking them on a barrage tour of Moss Bros, Darlington Yates’s and The LAD Bible, and then asking them to draw a spiv. He has served jail time for theft and burglary but is determined, with Francis’s help, to turn his life around. At home, his nana isn’t convinced. “Rome wasn’t built in a day,” Pembow protests as Nana Val wearily lists his past transgressions. “Well,” she replies. “It’d be nice when I don’t have to hide my purse, that’s all I’m saying.”
I’m sure with all the rigour and guidance Francis will provide, Pembow will be just fine. As the saying goes, coined verbatim by Francis: “If you want a steak you get sirloin. If you want ice-cream you get Tom And Jerry’s. If you want security you come to Sparta.”
