Partners in crime

It’s not every day that a television screenwriter is threatened with a trial for sedition, but G.F. Newman was after his series Law & Order aired on BBC2 in 1978. ‘The political fallout was enormous and there was a move to try and get me prosecuted by Sir Eldon Griffiths and a gang of MPs, but it didn’t go anywhere,’ Newman remembers. ‘It would have been a wonderful case had it done so.’

Law & Order rocked the boat by doing the unthinkable, so much so that BBC director-general Sir Ian Trethowan was hauled over the coals by the Home Office minister John Harris (later Lord Harris). It depicted the police, legal establishment and prison system as interlocking components of a web of corruption, in which everybody was happy to feed off the illicit proceeds of crime and the police and thieves were two sides of the same coin. It made Newman’s point for him that the actors playing the policemen might easily have changed places with the villains.

‘Trethowan made a good argument,’ says Newman. ‘He said, “We have independent-minded producers and they make drama of the day and this is one of them.” But the show was banned and didn’t get sold anywhere in the world, and didn’t come out of the cupboard for 30 years.’

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‘There was the most extraordinary uproar from MPs, from the Met, from the prison service, senior members of the BBC and the House of Lords,’ says its producer Tony Garnett, whose CV includes Cathy Come Home and many collaborations with Ken Loach (ironically, Garnett once appeared as an actor in Dixon of Dock Green, the epitome of television’s traditionally adulatory portrayal of the police). ‘How dare we tell these lies about our boys in the Met and so on.