I found this on the tinterweb, even though this show aired four years ago and i didn't see it myself, the review goes like this, which I found interesting:
Even by television's self-referential and indeed self-reverential standards, a TV programme about a TV programme inspired by a TV programme is stretching things a little, and I duly approached The Real Life on Mars with caution, as a police officer in 1973 might have approached an abandoned Aer Lingus rucksack in a London street, or as a Rastafarian in a London street might have approached a police officer in 1973.
As it turned out, my apprehension was groundless. The Real Life on Mars was an intelligent and enlightening documentary about the ways in which cop dramas down the years have reflected, and on occasion influenced, developments in policing. This was the opening salvo in BBC4's new Brit Cop season, and as one of those invited to a working men's club in the East End of London a couple of months ago, and asked to talk coherently in front of a camera about Z Cars and The Sweeney, I suppose I should declare some sort of interest. Not that I spotted myself on last night's programme. Maybe I wasn't coherent enough, or maybe my clunky aperçus have been stored for later in the season.
Most of the talking heads here were retired detectives, wheeled out to offer their thoughts on the authenticity of 1970s policing as interpreted by Life on Mars and before it, The Sweeney. Their views varied. For former Detective Chief Inspector Steve Crimmins, an adviser on Life on Mars, the brutal techniques of the 1970s, not to mention the sexism, racism and homophobia rampant in most police stations at the time, were actually toned down in the form of Philip Glenister's DCI Gene Hunt and his colleagues. Crimmins had an unlikely ally in Paddy Hill, one of the six people wrongfully convicted of the Birmingham pub bombings in 1974. Hill's only quibble with Life on Mars was that "it doesn't go far enough in respect of the brutality and the violence".
On the other hand, Bob Thorogood, who served in the Northamptonshire constabulary in the 1970s, reckoned that The Sweeney, which Life on Mars evoked with such unsubtle brilliance, harmed the police immeasurably and was one of the reasons why public respect for the police, pretty watertight at the end of the 1960s, had sprung so many leaks by the start of the 1980s. He insisted that the gun-toting, punch-throwing methods of detectives Regan and Carter in The Sweeney gave people a skewed and damaging view of the police, and even ex-DCI Jackie Malton, the Flying Squad officer who was the model for Jane Tennison in Prime Suspect, observed that she never saw her colleagues beating anyone up. Which, I suppose, is not to say that they didn't.
Nobody claimed that prejudices weren't rife in the police force in the 1970s. Maybe they still are, but these days they cannot be so casually expressed. A couple of retired female Metropolitan Police officers recalled how they were initiated into the CID by having their underwear torn down and their bottoms rubber-stamped. Outnumbered by men 25 to 1 in 1975, they couldn't walk up the stairs in the police station but had to use the lift, to prevent male colleagues from looking up their skirts. And David Michael, who in 1972 had been one of only 11 black officers out of 28,000, explained how he simply used to smile whether comments aimed at him were innocuous or offensive, so that nobody could see when he was smarting. Times have changed, but perhaps not as much as we like to congratulate ourselves that they have. Michael assured the programme that the Met is still bedevilled by the Life on Mars mindset, as represented by the Hunt acolyte who on being assigned a black colleague said, "First women, now a coloured, what's going to be next... dwarfs?" - Independant 2008
Strange Justice
In July 1981, a tortoise was sentenced to death for murder. Tribal leaders in an eastern Kenyan village formally condemned the tortoise because they suspected it of causing the deaths of six people by magic. However, because none of the villagers was prepared to face the tortoise's wrath by carrying out the execution, it was chained to a tree instead. The tortoise was later freed after the government promised an inquiry into the six deaths.
Harmless Fun - Police Are Human Too
Seems a shame these guys got reprimanded for this, assuming they didn't skive the whole afternoon off to do this, just seems like harmless fun to me, nice to see the police with an outward sense of fun, it can't all be serious work all the time.
So that was my fairly random thoughts around police stuff, if you like this post, please leave a comment and share the blog using the links below.
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