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’. ‘People take one look at you and think you’ve got zero authority,’ Will told us ruefully.

Luckily, those people are wrong – as we saw in an early scene when his authority was fully deployed on a man who’d been drunkenly throwing bottles at passing cars. ‘You need to be mindful at how you’re behaving,’ Will advised him firmly, before adding in a gentler tone, ‘You’re good to go.’ And with that, Will got back into his police car, reminding him to take his alcohol with him.  

Even he, mind you, thinks policemen are looking younger these days, not least 20-year-old Matt, whose mum definitely knows when he’s out because he lives with her.