When hit police drama Line of Duty returns to BBC One on Sunday evening, eager fans will have just one question on their minds: can Superintendent Ted Hastings, father figure to his police crew and deployer of excellent Ulster colloquialisms, really be H, the corrupt mastermind behind the evil deeds that fuel the show’s labyrinthine plot?
If he does turn out to be a wolf in sheep’s clothing, the loud noise you’ll hear across the land will be the breaking of thousands of hearts.
Adrian Dunbar, the 60-year-old Northern Irish actor who plays Ted, laughs. “These things can be quite arbitrary. Jed [Mercurio, the show’s creator] will say, ‘Why don’t we put a couple of looks here in this particular scene’, and suddenly you’re like, what the heck is going on? Am I the bad guy now?”
He’s sworn to secrecy, but notes: “There is something going on and it’s not just a red herring. This series does explore Ted’s background – his past, the situation with his wife, and something we already know – that he’s not very good with money.”
Indeed Hastings’s lack of financial nous would suggest he does not have the capacity to be the ultimate big bad of the series. Surely no criminal overlord would be living in a shabby chain hotel while coming up with a string of poor excuses for why he has yet to pay the bill.
“Well that’s absolutely right,” says Dunbar with the sort of twinkle that suggests it might actually be entirely wrong. “He’s obviously very, very bad with money if he’s really a criminal mastermind, very bad indeed. There are other things, of course, that go wrong.”
Of course. It wouldn’t be Line of Duty if things didn’t swiftly start going wrong for unit AC-12. The simple concept behind Mercurio’s thriller is: who polices the police? The answer, according to Line of Duty, is Hastings, an apparent bastion of moral probity who was once one of the few Catholic officers in the Royal Ulster Constabulary, and DIs Kate Fleming (Vicky McClure – known to long-term fans as TV’s most obvious undercover cop), and dapper Steve Arnott, the man most likely to put himself in danger over the next six weeks.
Dunbar, whose stage and film career includes noted turns in The Crying Game, Hear My Song and The General, appeared in TV series Cracker, Inspector Morse and Ashes to Ashes, but this marks his longest commitment to a show. “I didn’t recognise that there were dynamics and qualities about this show that would make it stand out,” he says.
“I genuinely thought it was a police procedural starring Lennie James [who was in the first series], so I just thought let’s get in here and go for this. Even when we got commissioned fora second series I still didn’t think it would become so big. You can actually pinpoint the moment half way through episode two of series two when the numbers started to climb. People just began talking about Keeley Hawes’s character and whether she was guilty or not and getting really interested.”He attributes Line of Duty’s continued success in part to it being “a very UK series, not something like CSI where you have cops who seem to know everything and have great patter and look very slick. Instead we’re missing beats all over the place. We’re not up to speed, we’re always trying to catch up and basing everything we do on trust.”
It helps too that “we are genuinely procedural. There’s bits where you see the whole office trawling through photographs to see if they can find one tiny thing. We show the slog that goes into turning up just one tiny clue. I think the police who watch particularly seem to like that.”
At the programme’s heart are the lengthy interrogation scenes when Ted and the rest of AC-12 finally get their man or woman to come in and start trying to unravel the truth.
“I think because we shoot them straight through, they have an almost theatrical flow,” Dunbar says. “This time around there are definitely some good ones: episodes five and six are really strong.”
In between the fourth and fifth series of Line of Duty, he co-starred in Sophie Petzal’s dark crime drama Blood, aired on Channel 5 in the UK, as a country GP in Ireland who may or may not have murdered his wife. It became a word-of-mouth hit and has just been recommissioned. “It had a completely different feel, which I liked because while there were some excellent twists and turns it was also a family drama, rural rather than urban, slow-paced and not trying to be flash. ”
Does he think people respond so strongly to Hastings because he’s the kind of character about whom you find yourself thinking, “What would Ted do?”
“Absolutely – I see things on Twitter where people are talking about Brexit and saying, shouldn’t Ted Hastings just go in and sort it?”
Yet despite his air of moral certainty, Hastings isn’t always right, and Dunbar likes that. “He’s very human, not terribly clever with certain things, and so in denial about the state of his marriage that it’s scary. But I think a lot of men are like that, hiding from home problems in their work. He’s quite a sad character in many ways.”
Does he ever worry that in a series where everyone is disposable, even Hastings might run out of road? “All the time,” he laughs. “Every time we get a new script we turn the pages with trepidation, thinking, ‘Oh God, it could be this time’. But as Martin [Compston, who plays Arnott] rightly says, we’ve had a good run. Whatever happens it has been brilliant.”
Line of Duty begins on BBC One on Sunday 31 March at 9pm
