Police force

I’ve often thought that a good idea for an authentic TV cop show would be to portray the police as neither dazzlingly brilliant (the traditional approach) nor horrifically corrupt (the traditionally subversive one) — but just a bit hopeless at solving crimes. There is, though, one thing that prevents the idea from being as original as I’d like: this is how the police already come across in many true-life dramas.

Take, for instance, the harrowing and — given its high-profile scheduling — extremely brave Three Girls (BBC1, Tuesday to Thursday), which provided an unsparing and wholly believable account of the Rochdale child-grooming scandal.

The first episode opened in 2008 with 15-year-old Holly (an astonishing performance by Molly Windsor) being interviewed by the police for smashing up a kebab shop — and, in flashback, telling them why. The shop concerned was where she’d regularly been going with two exciting-seeming new friends after moving to Rochdale from Derby. There, they’d met a group of Asian men, led by a twinkling fat man known as Daddy, who’d given them free food, booze and cigarettes. At first this (understandably) felt like good transgressive teenage fun — before Daddy demanded sex, explaining to Holly, in the tone of one patiently addressing a halfwit, that after ‘all these things I’ve given you, it’s part of the deal.’ He then raped her.

Faced with this revelation, the police officer spent a little time yawning, but eventually rallied enough to question Holly about her past sex life. Admittedly, Daddy did get arrested, but while out on bail he was free to threaten her into silence. The charges were dropped and normal service was not so much resumed as intensified, with Holly and her friends driven to ‘parties’ where they were passed around the assembled middle-aged men.