I’ve often thought that a good idea for an authentic TV cop show would be to portray the police as neither dazzlingly brilliant (the traditional approach) nor horrifically corrupt (the traditionally subversive one) — but just a bit hopeless at solving crimes. There is, though, one thing that prevents the idea from being as original as I’d like: this is how the police already come across in many true-life dramas.
Take, for instance, the harrowing and — given its high-profile scheduling — extremely brave Three Girls (BBC1, Tuesday to Thursday), which provided an unsparing and wholly believable account of the Rochdale child-grooming scandal.
The first episode opened in 2008 with 15-year-old Holly (an astonishing performance by Molly Windsor) being interviewed by the police for smashing up a kebab shop — and, in flashback, telling them why. The shop concerned was where she’d regularly been going with two exciting-seeming new friends after moving to Rochdale from Derby.
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