Line of Duty Series Five   Starring: Stephen Graham, Martin Compston, Vicky McClure, Adrian Dunbar and Anna Maxwell Martin Distributor: Acorn Media International RRP: £24.99 AV3517 Certificate: 15 Release Date: 06 May 2019

Line of Duty: Season 5 (2019. 6 eps x 60 min approx.) is a superior police thriller, created by Jed Mercurio, probably one of the best writers for television in this genre. The show is a muti-award winner and one of the strongest police shows recently produced.

For those of you who have not watched the show, its central premise is a game of cat and mouse between the Anti-Corruption Unit 12 (AC-12) and an OCG (organised crime organisation). At the heart of this is the search for ‘H’, the main leak in the police force which is allowing the crime gang to undertake audacious crimes and get away with them.

Our main POV characters are D.S. Steve Arnott (Martin Compston) and D.I. Kate Fleming (Vicky McClure) and they act as our guides through the labyrinthine world of Duty. It is also the story of Superintendent Ted Hastings (Adrian Dunbar) who is implicated as being ‘H’.

To be fair the story spends a lot of time in misdirection, so you're never sure if Hastings is bent or if he is being set up by someone else. This extends to many of the other characters as well, even the first episode spends a lot of time setting up two characters to be who you think they are before completely doing a 180 and changing everything you thought you knew.

With so many twists it is difficult to talk about the plot without giving any of the myriad of surprises away. Let us just say that this is a serious slice of good television, intelligent and compelling.

9

Charles Packer