Drugs, murder, theft: cue laughter

Behind the jokes, a TV drama tells us things we need to know about our cities

The scene is a rough, tough, bar-room on the wrong side of town. The room is seething with brigands, cut-throats - and worse. Enter a genuine Canadian Mountie resplendent in his Boy Scout hat and his red dress tunic. "May I have your attention, please?" he demands.

Instantly, a murderous knife flashes through the air and embeds itself, menacingly, in the woodwork next to our hero's manly shoulder. But his jaw is set and his voice is firm: "You realise I'm going to have to confiscate that?" At a stroke, the rabble is subdued.

It sounds like a vintage Boys' Own story, but in fact the setting is inner-city Chicago in the 1990s. To television viewers, it is instantly recognisable as part of the opening sequence of Due South, the cult comedy drama series which returns to BBC1 for a second season tonight.

This Canadian-made programme is frequently compared to Channel 4's quirky Northern Exposure but from an analytical point of view, it is exactly the opposite, for while Northern Exposure presents Alaska as the untamed wilderness, in Due South, it is the inner-city that has become the "new frontier". As an old hand admonishes over the opening titles: "Up there in no-man's-land, there isn't a better cop in the world, but in Chicago, they'd eat you alive in five minutes."

Due South is the continuing story of Benton Fraser, the Royal Canadian Mounted Policeman who spends most of his days upstandingly performing ceremonial duties for the Canadian consulate in downtown Chicago. The real action begins, however, whenever Fraser breaks away from his official role to battle instead with the forces of lawlessness in the dangerous state of Illinois.

On the surface, this provides the set-up for some whimsical visual humour in which Fraser, often with his horse, and usually accompanied by his pet husky, Diefenbaker, is contrasted conspicuously with the concrete and sky-scraper townscape of Chicago. In scenes such as the bar room, Fraser is presented as the ingenue, green to the ways of the American urban jungle. Yet, although he may be something of a tenderfoot in the metropolis, the lessons - both moral and physical - that Fraser learned back in the Yukon stand him in sterling stead in the criminal-infested cities to the south.

This presents a remarkable departure from the general flow of Boys' Own stories. In the typical adventure yarn, it is the virtues learned in "civilisation" which come to the hero's aid when confronted with the mortal perils of the wild. But in Due South, the wilderness is no longer un-tamed nature but the imploding inner-city of Chicago, with its muggers, murderers and crack dealers.

It is the lessons and the morals Fraser has learned in what we used to think of as the wilderness that equip him for survival and for civilising strength in the new frontier, in what we used to think of as civilisation. Fraser is decent. Fraser is strong. In his uniform, he even looks like a Boy Scout. Baden-Powell would have been proud. In the face of adversity, manly virtue conquers all.

Due South is not, perhaps, the first time in which popular culture has pitted the strengths of the outdoorsman against the iniquities of the city. In the 1970s, western sheriff Sam McLeod rode his horse down Fifth Avenue, and in the 1980s, Crocodile Dundee used skills honed in the Australian outback to make his way in New York. What Benton Fraser does particularly impressively, though, is succeed by way of his polite, upright, clean- living, old-fashioned, square-jawed virtues in the face of inner-city depravity. In Due South, it is the urbanites, and not the newcomer, who are in need of civilisation.

Okay, but so what? Well, popular culture is a mirror in which we see ourselves reflected. Not literally, perhaps; but even in our TV dramas, we can see ourselves acting out the issues that concern us. Due South provides a very good example of this. If we look beyond the visual gags, we can see a programme that does (unwittingly, perhaps) both reflect and articulate many people's widening concerns about not only the physical but also the moral decay of the city in a post-industrial age. We worry that urban society is imploding, and what was once thought of as dangerous wilderness is now seen as both safe and wholesome in comparison.

Clifford Geertz, the anthropologist, believed that the ceremonies and the rituals of "primitive" peoples were stories they told themselves about themselves, and that these could therefore be read like texts to reveal the things that they valued and the things that concerned them. Surely, television does much the same for us today - television drama is a map which charts the sea-changes in the way we feel about our own society.

If we look closely at Due South, it tells us that the Canadians, who had traditionally been thought of as worthy but dull in comparison to their glitzier American neighbours, are now beginning to feel strains of superiority over the people directly to the south of them. This sense of superiority is based not upon military might or economic prosperity, but upon cultural, social and ethical values. It is a Canadian-made programme, but might not its popularity in Britain also forecast a sea-change in cultural aspirations over here?

The popularity of Due South also carries a more sombre message. This slickly made show is billed as a comedy-drama, in which we react with laughter to the amusing idea of the inner city as the untamed wilderness. But is the collapse of the inner city really a laughing matter? Humour, perhaps, is a safety valve for genuine social concern, but maybe Due South is also telling us that unless we turn popular amusement into social action, the joke may well be on us.

Richard Howells is Lecturer in Communications Arts at the Institute of Communications Studies, University of Leeds.