End of the Line

I’ve been re-watching the first five series of Line of Duty, the police corruption unit drama whose sixth series has been gripping the nation. What struck me was the drop-off in quality after series 3, the climax of which was genuinely one of the most absorbing and shocking in recent TV history. It then became increasingly arch, oh-so pleased with its baroquely intermeshed storylines (you can imagine the crazy-wall

pin board with characters and places linked with a cat’s cradle of string lines) and has now degenerated into a montage of preposterous set-pieces, silly acronyms and hackneyed catchphrases to mark off on your bingo card. But don’t tell the show’s writer, Jed Mercurio, that. When a Guardian journalist dared to offer a critical opinion of the show, saying that it had gone “categorically off-piste” Mercurio replied with a (since deleted) torrent of abuse on Twitter, and doubled down on it in a recent interview.

It’s a salutary lesson of the dangers of giving free rein to the maverick genius, the auteur whose work is too far beyond the comprehension of TV functionaries who might want to, you know, venture an opinion. Take Hugo Blick, whose 2011 series The Shadow Line was a dark and convoluted story of yes, that again, police corruption. Its BBC2 teaser pronounced “Created by Hugo Blick. Written by Hugo Blick. Directed by Hugo Blick.” The problem was that its script seemed to have been edited by, well, absolutely nobody, so in thrall to Blick’s “process” were the bosses at the Beeb.

Something similar happened with the Harry Potter books. They began as finely observed, magical, gripping yarns, but as JK Rowling’s fame grew, and her publishers’ coffers groaned under the weight of all those Galleons and Knuts, nobody could interfere with her work. The stories became bloated and self-indulgent, in dire need of their darlings being murdered by a brave editor.

Rare examples of solitary genius have, of course, enriched civilisation. But would TS Eliot’s Waste Land be one of the greatest works of art of the 20th century without the insight of its editor, Ezra Pound, who suggested cuts that almost halved the length of the final published version?

Jed would have just told him he was a c***.