BBC One has confirmed the release date for Line Of Duty series 5, announcing that the hugely popular crime drama will hit our screens on March 31st 2019. Here’s everything you need to know…

Vicky McClure, Martin Compston and Adrian Dunbar will all reprise their roles in this fifth run of Line Of Duty, which is being helmed by the show’s creator Jed Mercurio.

We don’t have an official synopsis for the new series, but we do have an interesting statement from Mercurio. Here’s what the showrunner said in an interview with Pilot TV magazine, which ended up online thanks to Digital Spy:

“That is the fresh ground that we break in the series […] That we’ve had these shadowy figures, ‘the Balaclava Men’, who are part of an organised crime group and have featured on and off all through the previous four seasons. But we’ve never really gone behind the mask and identified them as proper characters and found out about them.

“That was something that we felt was overdue and so in this season, rather than the customary approach, which is we present a police officer who is involved in a case, and that for whatever reasons there are allegations of corruption which AC-12 investigate, we are looking at this organised crime group who clearly, it’s been established in the past, function to a certain extent through relationships with corrupt police officers.

“So, rather than looking at the corrupt police offers this time, we’re looking at the other side of the coin, which is the [organised crime group].”

Also, here’s the latest Line Of Duty series 5 trailer…

That date to mark in your diary is March 31st 2019, with the new series set to premiere at 9pm on BBC One.