- guardian.co.uk,
- Friday May 09 2008 10:19 BST
If you've never heard of this set of four TV films released on the 30th anniversary of their broadcast date, that could be because GF Newman's dissection of the justice system - adapted from his book, Sir, You Bastard - upset the establishment to the extent that the BBC director-general was summoned to the Home Office and told that it should not be repeated nor sold abroad. Apart from the NFT, this is the first showing for three decades of what should take its place in the social realism hall of fame, alongside Cathy Come Home, Boys from the Blackstuff and Our Friends in the North.
It's kind of appropriate that the series should be fitted up by authority: that's its theme. Law and Order came out only two years after cosy cop drama Dixon of Dock Green was finally put to bed. That allowed for the occasional "bad apple" in the force; these four full-length films give us a barrel that stinks of corruption, incompetence and laziness throughout the system. Criminals here don't get arrested because evidence shows they've committed a crime; they get nicked because, as Derek Martin's detective puts it: "We've got one in the book. We need a body. You've been elected."
There's nothing like Gene Hunt here: director Les Blair and producer Tony Garnett (whose impressive CV includes Kes) keep everything low-key and documentary style - no music, no close-ups, no dramatic camera angles, and definitely nothing that looks like acting. Many of the cast were non-professionals. Of the lead characters, two of them - Martin and Peter Dean - were to do a long stretch themselves, eight years each in EastEnders. The other, damping down his natural exuberance, is Ken Campbell, as a wonderfully slippery solicitor.
