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Confessions Of
SERIES 1 - 1. CONFESSIONS OF A COPPER
Review by: David Butcher
Channel 4 Wed 19th Nov 10pm - 11pm
Repeat: Channel 4 +1 Today 11pm
Repeat: 4seven Tomorrow 1:05am
Remember Life on Mars and its portrayal of old-style policing, in the days when cops were cops and they didn’t let the rules get in the way of fitting up a wrong ‘un? Well what we have here is essentially Gene Hunt – the Documentary, as a selection of retired officers reminisce about the bad old days.
It’s brilliantly put together and what starts as slightly knockabout, bar-room anecdotage (how they’d take a few hairs from a suspect’s hairbrush and place them in the balaclava used for a robbery) shades into something darker. We hear of brutal sexism (one female officer recalls a senior officer dragging her around a snooker room by her ankles as a kind of initiation) and an inside view on the day Blair Peach was fatally injured in a riot.
1/4. With the onset of increasingly strict regulations, health-and-safety rules and political correctness, this series looks at whether many of Britain's professionals have lost the respect and authority they once held dear, as ordinary police officers, GPs, secretaries and teachers lift the lid on their working lives. In the first programme, eight officers describe how they feel life in the force has changed for ever, as they trace the arrival of the panda patrol car, the integration of women, the riots of the late 1970s and early 80s, and seismic shifts in the nation's ethnic and economic make-up.
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