Liverpool Sound and Vision Rating * * * *
Cast: Brit Marling, James Nesbitt, Bertie Carvel, Paterson Joseph, Ella Smith, Jonny Sweet, Nicola Walker, Cavan Clerkin, Jill Halfpenny, Adam Deacon, Nick Blood, Stuart Martin, Andrew Brooke.
There are times when the continuous stick against the back of the collective head is not enough, sometimes it takes cleverly written satire and drama with very well hidden comic undertones to get the message across that in 21st Century Britain, the apparent message is all consuming and powerful. The message is as loud and perhaps as obnoxious as its counterpart and sometimes occasional lover, the economy. If listened too very carefully, the two words can be interpreted as one and the same and the mantra gets repeated over an d over again like a man finding out that raw onions is bad for his digestive system but carries on believing that they are doing him good just because it helps expel wind.
The message is one that has been used to full effect in the Channel Four’s excellent and well written drama, Babylon. Following on from a critically acclaimed pilot episode earlier in the year, Babylon descends even further down into the realms of police corruption, of the public and often bitter face of public relations and the secrets kept in order to maintain a level of confidence in society in this six part series in which nothing is truly ever certain.
Politics is a dangerous game and yet every day the force of it takes more casualties, more souls down its often black heart that the divide between a good person doing wrong and bad peopledoing something decent is blurred, shifted and ever distorted. In Police Commissioner Richard Miller, the ever consummate James Nesbitt, and Director of Communications Liz Garvey, played by the sensational Brit Marling, these lines are blurred to the point of corrective surgery being dismissed as an option, the enormity of the two jobs at odds with the greater good and welfare of the citizens of London. It is the bludgeoning attack of vague overall policing being delivered with the faint feminine guile and softness of appearance of the Mati Hari. Babylon asks the very real question of who is actually in charge, not just in the police force but in all corners of society, and should they be there at all.
With a series that takes in such story lines as a bomber loose in London, a tactical weapons unit on the verge of going rogue and splintering a police force, a forced strike in the hands of paid policemen over the C.S.O.’s and office politics at the very heart of it all, Babylon has been one of the great surprise hits of the year.
With great appearances by Jill Halfpenny, Brit Marling, the superb Nicola Walker, Bertie Carvel, James Nesbitt, Patterson Joseph and Cavan Clerkin, Babylon is not a light and fluffy look at 21st Century policing, it is no Dixon of Dock Green or Heartbeat, it is a true reflection of what many actually see happening all around them, that even now spin is out of control and the message, which is ever changing is as dangerous to the fabric of society as the bloated image of the word economy.
A superb series in which surely there can only be more.
Ian D. Hall