On Sunday a drama began with ED905 being stolen by an OCG who’d faked an RTC that required IR, little realising that they had a UCO in their midst. So yes, Line of Duty (BBC1) is back in all its jargon-laden glory — and, judging from the first episode, it’s lost none of its ability to grip either.
For those a bit rusty on their police abbreviations, that opening scene featured the female member of an organised crime group pretending she’d crashed her car with a baby inside, causing the woman in charge of a passing police convoy to stop and help. The rest of the gang then appeared in regulation Line of Duty balaclavas, killed three officers and drove off with the lorry-load of heroin the police were escorting.
When the news reached the anti-corruption unit AC-12, the initial reaction of boss Ted Hastings (Adrian Dunbar) was naturally to give us his first ‘Mother of God!’ of the series. He also realised the gang must have had inside information, not just about the route, but about the fact that the officer in charge was a mother herself — the thinking apparently being that no bloke or childless woman would bother to stop and save the life of a child. Before long, the insider had been found and it was time for the first of those trademark interviews in which lines such as ‘JLM5 can be viewed in image 11’ become weirdly dramatic.
For a while, in fact, I did wonder whether Line of Duty, now in its fifth series, might end up straying into self-parody — always a somewhat unfair danger in a show as distinctive as this. But once the thrills were piling up with their customary ferocity, such chin-stroking seemed entirely beside the point (and anyway there wasn’t time).
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