You Should Watch ‘The Shadow Line’

In a world where it feels like you’re more likely to have no money and get shanked by a disenfranchised yoof after about 7pm if you venture outside (or, indeed, inside) Zone 1 of London- and that’s presuming you haven’t already been blown up by a mad Saudi Arabian- is it any wonder that media entertainment is such big business? Can we really blame people for wanting some escapism? I’m biased, of course- I love the escapism, me. Confronted with life and all its dickish behaviour, escape seems like the only sane option sometimes. Which, in a possibly roundabout way, explains why the BBC have increasingly got it in the neck over their relative inability to produce any decent drama. Given the chunk of money we hand over to them in the form of the license fee, the argument goes (or ought to), shouldn’t they be doing more to provide us with intriguing plots, believable characters and a temporary respite from the soul-crushing drudgery of our existence?

They seem to be doing just that.

There’s been a notable advert lately pushing a new series of drama shows on BBC channels. You might have seen it. One of them was the delightful Exile, which featured John Simm (who I still find it quite hard to think of as anyone other than The Master) as a tabloid journalist-turned-crusading reporter returning home to his Alzheimers-ridden father (Jim Broadbent). A winning combination of fantastic cinematography, some superb performances and terrific lighting and sound, it’s the sort of thing we need to see more of. It’s the sort of thing The Shadow Line is.

Ejiofor, Eccleston and, in the background, a deliciously mysterious Rea

I’ve gotta admit, it was the cast that won me over before I had grasped what the concept was. There’s a fair bit of geek cred in this serious cops and robbers drama: Chiwetel Ejiofor (The Operative in Serenity), Stephen Rea (Inspector Finch in V For Vendetta) and Christopher “Stupid Apes” Eccleston (of Doctor Who fame). It’s a single vision, the product of Hugo Blick, who is writer, director and producer- and who was also, it turns out in a delightful twist of fate, the hilarious Baron von Gerhardt in the Private Plane episode of Blackadder Goes Forth. He’s definitely more known for comedy apparently- there’s something called Marion and Geoff which I had never heard of until looking him up, but by all accounts it’s good. The creative process to crafting something dark and bleak like The Shadow Line is, he says in The Guardian, not so different to making comedy: “I thought all along that I was writing drama with funny lines. Drama, to me, is something that tells the truth. Comedy tells the truth as well, but can feel too heightened to be realistic. My interest is in finding the dramatic truth of something.”

In The Shadow Line, the dramatic truth is insinuated in the title- there’s a thin and hard-to-distinguish line between our world and the criminal world, but, perhaps more importantly, there’s a thin line in all of us between moral and immoral. The primary demonstrations of this assertion are Ejiofor and Eccleston, a cop and a crook oddly inverted. Ejiofor’s amnesiac officer, crippled by memory loss after a bullet lodged itself in his skull, is believed to have been double-dipping- he’s definitely doing something dodgy, as in episode 3 we found out he neglected to log his near-fatal operation and that he has a second family besides his wife. Eccleston, meanwhile, runs a clean fruit and flowering operation designed to be a front for cocaine smuggling. At the same time, he wants out so he can care for his wife, who has Alzheimers (which is clearly the trendy mental illness of the moment). In between them there’s a murdered drug baron, a sole witness, a sinister man in black (Rea, working Blick’s dialogue beautifully) and some absolutely delightful scenes, the highlight being Ejiofor pursuing Rafe Spall (who’s playing Jay Wratten, an unsettlingly nonchalant sociopath) pursuing the witness on foot. Having had to barrel out of his car, Ejiofor spits, “I am on foot! Fucking typical British car chase!”

There’s silly moments- at his drug baron father’s funeral, Spall is confronted by a mysterious ex-associate, the back-and-forth tumbling into Garth Merenghi-esque levels of allusion and metaphor- but this is so far ahead of, for example, the lamentable Outcasts that they don’t even register on the same scale. The whole show is tense, teetering on the edge of a knife. The lighting and sound match: colour is dark, brooding and menacing, or stark and washed out, while there’s a very Dark Knight-esque Joker theme refrain which ominously underscores moments of particular tension. Even the lovely theme tune, ‘Pause’ by Emily Barker and the Red Clay Halo, is whistful- beautiful, but melancholy.

Watch it on BBC2, Thursdays, 9pm. Watch it now, before the BBC decide they’ve done enough decent drama for the moment.