Who are these pathologically liberal rozzers? Channel 4’s Night Coppers reviewed

Grizzled police officers of the old school should probably avoid Channel 4’s Night Coppers for reasons of blood pressure. Like most documentary series with close access to the police, this one paints them in a light so favourable as to be almost comically sycophantic. The trouble for those grizzled types is that – the times being as they are – what’s now considered favourable is to make the rozzers who patrol Brighton after dark all seem like that pathologically liberal Dutch cop played by Paul Whitehouse in the late 1990s.

Not that this is a reference which most of the officers featured in Wednesday’s opening episode would get – largely because they hadn’t been born by then. The first we met was Will, 22, who’s regularly greeted by the locals with cries of ‘Does your mum know you’re out?’ and ‘I’ve got pubes older than you’.