YOU’RE NICKED: INVESTIGATING BRITISH TELEVISION POLICE SERIES. By Ben Lamb. Manchester UP, 2020. 232 pp. $120 hardcover.

Abstract

T his highly focused book works through British television’s engagement with the police procedural genre, a mainstay of many national traditions. Ben Lamb makes careful distinctions about the genealogy he is tracing, noting that crime in general and detective traditions more specifically are not quite what he has in mind. Instead, he notes “I have chosen for analysis here series that regularly depict the routine work of police constables and detectives” (3). Whatever the correspondences to related traditions (Sherlock Holmes adaptations, for instance), Lamb is looking at the hard core of police television series over several decades, from Dixon of Dock Green (BBC, 1955–1976) to Broadchurch (ITV, 2013–2017). While this is a potentially limiting choice, his methodological choices make up for some of the inherent restrictions in the premise, in that the series under consideration mutate over time such that they come to embrace other genre traditions as a matter of course. First, a word of caution. The book does not do an especially comprehensive job of contextualizing British series in relation to other national television traditions until the end. The first half of the book is very specifically focused on the British television context, such that there is little room for comparison to the genre elsewhere, especially the United States. While reading the chapter on the 1980s, which (to be fair) does provide a fascinating exploration of feminist thought in such series as Juliet Bravo (BBC, 1980–1985) and The Gentle Touch (ITV, 1980–1984), I could not help but think about how these slow, methodical, and somewhat cramped/interior-focused series compared to the cinematic sweep and serialized plots of American series like Miami Vice (NBC, 1984–1990) or Crime Story (NBC, 1986–1988). I would have especially liked to hear about the reception of US series by British audiences, given the major differences in approach. Lamb gets better at this sense of comparative contextualization later in the book, though, in situating 2000s tech and sci-fi inspired series in relation to American counterparts such as CSI: Crime Scene Investigation (CBS, 2000–2015). The chapter on the series of the 2010s is even better in this regard, with Broadchurch and Happy Valley (BBC, 2014–) being discussed in terms of the boom for Nordic Noir, which has had a global resonance through remakes and re-imaginings, and whose focus on landscapes connects readily to the British tradition. Lamb’s approach throughout is to do close readings of a few series that form representative examples of the trends of a given decade. While there is some sense of the larger scope of cop-show series that were running during a given time frame, the book instead jumps quickly into close readings of the chosen series. Truth be told, I wanted a bit more mention of some of the other series, as many are unfamiliar to readers outside of the UK, and I left the book without feeling like I’d fully fleshed out a sense of what was happening elsewhere. These reservations aside, the close readings are very good. Lamb has a general interest in looking at space, and each chapter looks at the spaces of the police station, the officer’s domestic space, and the combination of the two (when work or the job breach the officer’s domestic space; 8). As such, Lamb combines an interest in representation to the larger historical and contextual currents feeding these shows: