Liverpool Sound and Vision Rating 7/10
Cast: Brit Marling, James Nesbitt, James Robinson, Paterson Joseph, Adam Deacon, Jill Halfpenny, Mark Womack, Nicola Walker, Daniel Kaluuya, Nick Blood, Andrew Brooke, Deborah Rosan, Lee Nicholas Harris, Bertie Carvel, Lee Asquith-Coe, Navin Chowdhry, Ella Smith, Jaspal Badwell, Vic Waghorn, Paul Blackwell, Stuart Matthews, Stuart Martin, Jonny Sweet, Elena Hargreaves.
Despite Babylon opening with the type of shot that Channel Four were famous for when they first started out as a broadcaster, the kind of camera angle that would make the late Mary Whitehouse splutter and cough as if somebody had suggested she should drown her sorrows in a five day bender in Majorca, the pastiche of modern policing by Danny Boyle, Jesse Armstrong and Sam Bain was at least a look through a polarised lens at the way the public see today’s Police Force.
With a sniper on the loose in London, a police marksman whose bottle has finally deserted him and an officer of the law ready to go into firearms training, the type you wouldn’t trust with a water pistol at a fun fair taking on a bewildered clown, all being handled by a new person in charge of public relations, there was much scope for the programme to be as devilishly wicked as it wanted to be and the writers certainly seemed to have a ball with that in mind.
Although this was one of those pieces of television that worked well because it was a true ensemble, a cast, no matter how small the part or how seemingly innocuous, that thrived and blossomed and had the audience gripping the comfy throwaway pillow as if it might shake some sense into to some of the more unsavoury and distasteful colourful characters that dominate the police force. Each character was so well observed that the writers may as well have been bugging New Scotland Yard for notes on how not to be seen to do their duty.
From the lamentable TSG Officer Robbie, played with great conviction by Adam Deacon, to the brilliance of James Nesbitt, Paterson Joseph, Britt Marling and Mark Womack, Babylon painted a world in which the consciousness police officer stood rank and file among those that you perhaps wouldn’t trust to look after your bag of ten penny mix. James Nesbitt and Britt Marling especially were seen as being driven by the need to be seen as transparent, to do their duty, one as the Chief Constable, the other as the new face of Public Relations; both actors showing how the police need to be seen as on the side of the public, without fear and contradiction, whilst at all times presenting how much of a surveillance society the country has become.
Babylon was a police drama/comedy like no other, it certainly captured the imagination and sewed the genres together better than a stitched up and fabricated case of mistaken identity. Babylon bought back the memories of what Channel 4 once stood for brilliantly, inventive and questioning television at its satirical best.
Ian D. Hall