CHRISTOPHER STEVENS reviews last night’s TV: The bad old days when we had more bent coppers than crooks
Bent Coppers: Crossing The Line Of Duty
There is no one more shocked by life’s injustice than a criminal who finds himself the victim of crime. It’s especially unfair, because he can hardly call the police.
You can’t help but laugh at the indignation of petty crook Michael Perry, a London tealeaf at the tail end of the 1960s.
He attracted the attention of a couple of CID detectives, Robson and Harris, who paid him a little visit at his home. There, they noted some innocent items, jemmies and the like, which might be useful to a safecracker in his professional capacity.
Perry protested that he didn’t do safes. Robson and Harris agreed he was a good lad, and offered to shake hands. When they came away, they had Perry’s fingerprints all over a lump of gelignite.
Bent Coppers: Crossing the Line of Duty. Pictured: Former DCS John Simmonds
It would take morals of tempered steel not to feel the little toerag had it coming. But the coppers didn’t want to arrest Perry — they intended to blackmail him.
From then on, whatever he nicked, he had to share with the detectives . . . or else go to jail.
Poor Michael Perry. He would almost have been better off with a proper job, paying his taxes like the rest of us. Life can be harsh.
Bent Coppers: Crossing The Line Of Duty (BBC2) retold the next part of his story with relish and the aid of a reel-to-reel recording that, more than 50 years on, is still staggering in the cynicism it reveals.
In late 1969, Perry took his grievance to a couple of Fleet Street reporters, who hid a tape machine in the boot of his car. They captured hours of conversation with another corrupt detective, John Symonds, who boasted: ‘We’ve got more villains in our game than you’ve got in yours.’
Symonds promised immunity to Perry, as long as he kept handing over bribes — or ‘drinks’, in the CID argot. He even offered to provide police muscle for robberies: ‘You can’t have any better insurance than that.’
Former CID officers and veteran journalists chuckled over the story, but the real colour was supplied by footage from police promotional films of the era. There was a nostalgic glamour to the shots of recruits on the parade ground, rows of uniformed constables at the canteen and typewriters clattering in busy station offices.
A haze of fond memory hung over the grubbiest stories. Even the man who was fitted up, as a teenager, for a mailbag theft he hadn’t committed, seemed puzzled by the naivety of the times — his own, his parents’, and that of the jurors who believed without question the fabricated police evidence.
The Great British Sewing Bee
Rating: 
Nostalgic haze defines the dominant mood on The Great British Sewing Bee (BBC1). Pictured: Joe Lycett, Esme Young, Patrick Grant (left to right)
It was a programme short on real insight, though one contributor did identify a sea-change in Britain — the arrival of drugs, which brought the children of the middle classes into conflict with the law for the first time.
Nostalgic haze defines the dominant mood on The Great British Sewing Bee (BBC1), filmed in a flurry of lace sleeves and flounced hems. From the moment comedian Joe Lycett arrived and tossed his pink fur coat to judge Esme Young, it was clear we’d returned to a more wide-eyed era. Almost the only concession to 2021’s nasty realities was a bottle of hand sanitiser.
Squirting it around, the presenter chirruped: ‘Germs give up hope with a spray of Joe Soap.’
The show’s 12 new contestants included a dinner lady with a cat called Ziggy Stardust, a French trumpeter in a gay symphony orchestra, a burlesque dancer and a cruise ship entertainment director.
The Sewing Bee is lightweight, it’s silly, it’s engrossing and it couldn’t show up at a more welcome moment.