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Line Of Duty
Scripted by Jed Mercurio, the series returned on Sunday night (31 March) and recorded the highest ratings for an episode in the show’s history.
Overnight figures show that an average of 7.8 million viewers watched the first episode of series five – a boost of 2.8 million from the series four premiere.
The latest episode, which peaked at 8 million viewers, saw Stephen Graham and Rochenda Sandall join the cast.
According to the BBC, only the FA cup coverage from 25 January this year was more popular with younger viewers than the latest episode of Line Of Duty , which enjoyed a 38% overall audience share last night.
Show all 20 1 /20The 20 best bad police officers on TV The 20 best bad police officers on TV 20. Gene Hunt (Philip Glenister) in Life on Mars/Ashes to Ashes The 2006 time-travelling cop show, in which John Simm’s enlightened modern policeman woke (“woke” being the operative word) from a car accident in the thuggish policing era of 1973, spawned an accidental anti-hero in Philip Glenister’s swaggering bully-boy DCI Gene Hunt. He was a character so popular that he spawned a spin-off set in the early 1980s, Ashes to Ashes, in which Keeley Hawes was on the receiving end of his jocular chauvinism. Harvey (Bad Lieutenant) Keitel played Hunt in the US version of Life on Mars.
BBC
The 20 best bad police officers on TV 19. Martin Rohde (Kim Bodnia) in The Bridge Rohde was the Danish partner (and polar opposite) of The Bridge’s Swedish cop Saga Noren, an empathetic foil to Noren’s Aspergers-ish detachment. Warm and very human he might have been, Rohde was also an unfaithful husband and morally flawed detective, finally shipped to her superiors after Noren suspected that he had poisoned (in prison) the killer of his 18-year-old son. He had.
BBC
The 20 best bad police officers on TV 18. Gilles “Gilou” Escoffier (Thierry Godard) in Spiral His borderline policing methods and former drug habit always made Parisian lieutenant Gilles “Gilou” Escoffier a diamond in the rough, but he crossed the line by stealing gold ingots from a crime gang – enough for his long-term friend and partner Tintin Fromentin to quit the unit in disgust. The question for the upcoming new series is whether it’s also too much for boss and now lover Laure Berthaud?
BBC
The 20 best bad police officers on TV 17. Jack Regan (John Thaw) in The Sweeney It’s hard to overestimate the impact in 1975 of this hard-hitting (literally) drama about the Flying Squad, shaking up the cosy world of TV police dramas, with “You’re nicked” and “Shut it!” replacing Dixon of Dock Green’s avuncular “Evening all”. Jack Regan might have been honest, but his tendency to punch first and ask questions later became a byword for 1970s-style policing. It’s hard to believe that Thaw grew up to be Inspector Morse.
ITV
The 20 best bad police officers on TV 16. Andy Sipowicz (Dennis Franz) in NYPD Blue Described by one critic as “a drunken, racist goon with a heart of gold”, the label homophobic could also be added to Franz’s character (first essayed in Hill Street Blues), although Sipowicz did make sporadic attempts to dry out and become more liberal in outlook. Invariably taking the “bad cop” role during police interrogations, it was always unwise to leave this bundle of anger in a comb-over and moustache alone with a suspect.
ABC
The 20 best bad police officers on TV 15. John Wadsworth (Kevin Doyle) in Happy Valley Sarah Lancashire may have been the star of the show, but Downton Abbey’s Kevin Doyle gave a quietly brilliant performance as cop-turned-murderer John Wadsworth in the second series of Sally Wainwright’s Yorkshire-set drama – 50 shades of horrified guilt and denial crossing his face as he investigated his own crime and witnessed an innocent suspect nearly go down for it.
BBC/Red Productions/Ben Blackall
The 20 best bad police officers on TV 14. DS Bill Otley (Tom Bell) in Prime Suspect With his stare as adamantine as an Easter Island statue, and his mocking smirk, Otley was the intractable foe of Helen Mirren’s DCI Jane Tennison and the sexist ringmaster of the station’s sneering male clique. He wasn’t all bad, however, and when, in the last-ever episode, the alcoholic Tennison ran into Otley at an AA meeting, he tried to make amends and help her sober up.
ITV
The 20 best bad police officers on TV 13. DS Stella Gibson (Gillian Anderson) in The Fall Stella Gibson may be dedicated to her job, but her strange fascination with Jamie Dornan’s Northern Irish serial killer Paul Spector always teasingly bordered on the psychosexual. And when it came to the actual sexual, Gibson wasn’t above bedding her police subordinates – although as Detective Sergeant Tom Anderson pointed out to her after a night between the sheets, he does bear a strong physical resemblance to Spector. Kinky.
BBC
The 20 best bad police officers on TV 12. Gunvald Larsson (Mikael Persbrandt) in Beck The Stockholm police department’s human battering ram, Martin Beck’s right-hand man-mountain was never one to play by the rules. A former member of the merchant marine, Gunvald was a bully and a misogynist but fans came to love his short-circuiting of official procedure. That said, the character’s funeral after being shot dead was sparsely attended.
C More
The 20 best bad police officers on TV 11. DCI Fred Thursday (Roger Allam) in Endeavour It wasn’t looking good in the most recent series of the Inspector Morse prequel as Morse’s formerly avuncular mentor at Oxford City Police CID, Fred Thursday, seemed to be going the way of a forged 10-bob note. With a bent new boss, DCI Ronnie Box, Thursday was taking a more muscular approach to nicking suspects and pocketing envelopes stuffed with cash before seeing the light and returning to the side of the angels.
ITV
The 20 best bad police officers on TV 10. Eddy Caplan (Jean-Hugues Anglade) in Braquo This relentlessly downbeat and violent Gallic take on The Shield (see below), created by ex-cop Olivier Marchal, followed a four-person squad of rules-disregarding officers we first meet gauging a suspect’s eyeball with a pen. It’s all increasingly brutal from there as Eddy Caplan and colleagues combat Parisian criminals with implacable force. What is the French for ‘an eye for an eye’?
Canal+
The 20 best bad police officers on TV 9. William A Rawls (John Dorman) in The Wire If Dominic West's Jimmy McNulty is the nearest that the Baltimore police depicted in David Simon’s peerless drama have to a hero, then Rawls is the closest to a villain. A ruthless career cop whose rise and rise was facilitated by keeping inconvenient statistics – especially relating to murdered black men – off the books, he was also a bullying hypocrite, a married man cruising the city's dingier gay bars.
Canal+
The 20 best bad police officers on TV 8. Frank Agnew (Mark Strong) in Low Winter Sun The downbeat Wire-wannabe Low Winter Sun started life on Channel 4 before being remade – Mark Strong included – by AMC and set in Detroit. Strong played homicide detective Frank Agnew who murders a corrupt fellow cop and stages it to look like a suicide after mistakenly thinking the victim had killed his girlfriend. As in the British original, Lennie James plays Agnew's co-conspirator Joe Geddes.
AMC
The 20 best bad police officers on TV 7. Dexter Morgan (Michael C Hall) in Dexter Not a policeman as such but the adopted son of a Miami cop who grew up to become a forensics specialist for a fictional Miami police department, Dexter had the perfect cover for his secret double life as a vigilante serial killer. And knowing what his fellow CSI officers would be looking for at a crime scene meant he was extra careful in his methods.
Showtime
The 20 best bad police officers on TV 6. Chief Superintendent Lorraine Craddock (Pippa Haywood) in Bodyguard As Head of Protection Command, the politician-shielding unit of the Met, Craddock was the commanding officer of Bodyguard's main character, Sergeant David Budd (Richard Madden) and responsible for assigning him to protect Home Secretary Julia Montague (Keeley Hawes). She was also [spoiler alert] the police insider in the conspiracy to kill Montague and make Budd the fall guy.
BBC
The 20 best bad police officers on TV 5. Chief Superintendent John Deakin (Tony Doyle) in Between the Lines Long before Line of Duty there was Between the Lines, the BBC's 1992 drama series starring Neil Pearson as a new recruit to the police's internal Complaints Information Bureau – a task hampered because his boss, John Deakin, a tough former RUC officer played with edgy menace by Tony Doyle, was more corrupt than most of the people he was investigating.
BBC
The 20 best bad police officers on TV 4. John Luther (Idris Elba) in Luther When we first meet John Luther he has chased a villain to the top of a staircase and has his foot on the miscreant's hand as he dangles several storeys up. Will he tread on his fingers and make him fall to his possible death? You bet. Idris Elba brings a brooding intensity to a policeman who will fall in love with the sociopathic murderer, Alice Morgan, he is investigating. They understand each other. Ahhh.
BBC
The 20 best bad police officers on TV 3. Vic Mackey (Michael Chiklis) in The Shield Vic Mackey and his fellow Strike Team of corrupt LAPD officers used criminal means – including murder, torture and planting evidence – to take out the criminals in a TV show that made Dirty Harry look like Mary Poppins. Mackey started by shooting an innocent cop in the face in the show’s pilot episode, a taste of things to come, but he was made somehow sympathetic by an incredible performance from Michael Chiklis.
FX
The 20 best bad police officers on TV 2. DI Fred Pyall (Derek Martin) in Law and Order Derek Martin, who went on to find soap fame as Charlie Slater in EastEnders, gave the performance of a lifetime as the blank-faced, hooded-eyed copper Fred Pyall, fitting up innocent suspects, putting the squeeze on snouts and nonchalantly taking back-handers from criminals. GF Newman's BBC drama was deemed so shocking in 1978 that it was locked away, never to see the light of day for another 30 years.
BBC
The 20 best bad police officers on TV 1. DI Matthew ‘Dot’ Cottan (Craig Parkinson) in Line of Duty Jed Mercurio’s BBC police drama is a positive barrel of bad apples – a rogue’s gallery where nobody, with the possible exceptions of detectives Kate Fleming and Steve Arnott – is above suspicion. Craig Parkinson gave a wonderfully slippery performance as DI Cottan, the AC-12 regular with a double life as a crime-syndicate insider known as the Caddy. Any redeeming features? He did die by throwing himself between an assassin’s bullets and Fleming at the end of series three.
BBC
The figures follow the ratings success of Mercurio drama Bodyguard . The final episode of the gripping BBC thriller had a huge television audience of 14.3 million.
Viewers tuning in to Line Of Duty saw a brutal attack on Pc Maneet Bindra, played by Maya Sondhi. The episode centred on an investigation into an ambush of a truck carrying heroin by a gang wearing balaclavas. Martin Compston, Vicky McClure and Adrian Dunbar also returned to the BBC One series.
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