The second episode of BBC One’s new police drama does not have the challenge of the first, which had to introduce a whole brace of characters.
It’s clear that Cuffs is channelling the mid-era highs of The Bill, since each episode is reasonably self-contained: no crimes are going to be investigated over the course of a couple of episodes, and there’s certainly no season-long crime story arc. Cuffs is not the place where we finally discover who burned down the West Pier.
What we do have is the soap opera elements of the main character’s personal lives: DS Moffat decides to take affairs (literally) into her own hands, almost as if she’s not in exactly the right city to be told that there are plenty more fish in the sea, while Alex Carter’s Lino is busy struggling with an eating disorder.
One character’s sexuality is revealed with relatively little fanfare (or even dialogue), but that scene is held over until the end of the episode, suggesting that it’s meant to be a surprising revelation. That said, it’s refreshing to see gay and lesbian characters on mainstream television whose storylines are not necessarily defined by what gender they fancy.
It remains unclear what sort of programme Cuffs is – drama, or something slightly lighter. There are grimly dramatic scenes, drawn in crayon. It’s telling that the title credits (complete with the show title in lurid yellow) have the feel of a holiday postcard.
We mentioned ITV’s The Bill before, and it’s worth noting that despite (or perhaps because of) that programme’s somewhat factory line assembly of year-round episodes, it had a very good sense of how to juggle the two masks of comedy and tragedy. The sheer volume of episodes undoubtedly helped: you got to know the characters very well before storylines played around with what to expect.
Obviously, TV drama is a different beast now, and there’s less onscreen hours to play with at this point. When Cuffs sheers from comedy to tense drama – as if often does, it can be quite jarring. The balance is most successful in the scenes with Sherlock star Amanda Abbington, not just because she’s a deft comedic actor – although that’s a large part of it, and her facial reactions when faced with idiots or procedure are worth the entry fee alone – but because it’s in her scenes that Cuffs appears to most successful at understanding the juggling act between police drama and broad farce.
Elsewhere, the blending is more clumsy, veering from the ‘funny bit’ to the ‘upsetting bit’ with little to no warning, and occasionally within the same scene. Last time, we alluded to the fact that Cuffs fills BBC One’s mid-week early evening space vacated by Waterloo Road, and the point remains valid. This is likely never going to be as demanding, or as rewarding as, say, River, but it’s really not attempting to be.
Once you accept Cuffs for what it is – a cop show with an amiably retro format that the older kids are allowed to watch before they go to bed – it becomes a lot more enjoyable. We’re underselling things slightly: there’s a good, sure directorial eye on things, most significantly in a cute match-cut that goes from Brighton Wheel to steering wheel.
Certain things still stretch credulity – since Brighton, unlike Sun Hill, is an actual place, it’s always obvious when our heroes transmat from one end of the city to the other – and it should perhaps be a concern that Brighton & Hove is apparently being protected by less than ten officers, since they can all be stuck into a small room for a morning briefing.
It does mean, however, that the cast are easy to get to know, and while nobody actually says ‘Let’s be careful out there,’ we can rebrand this as Hove Street Blues.
Aired at 8pm on Wednesday 4 November 2015 on BBC One.
> Buy Season 1 on DVD on Amazon.
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