Night buyers (C4)
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A taste of the country (C5)
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This is a plot. It’s a conspiracy to make us all feel old. Everyone knows it’s a sign of age when bobbies start to look younger, so Brighton Police are recruiting adolescents.
PC Matt on Night Coppers (C4) seems almost ready to do his GCSEs. His patrol car partner PC Will, with a wisp of beard on his chin, could be his big brother, who is about to start university.
In fact, Will is 22 and has been an officer for over two years. It makes me feel so old that I imagine Chelsea Pensioners will soon rise to offer me a seat on the subway.
PC Sophie said ‘It’s not much different than babysitting’, in Night Coppers
Matt is 20 but has completed basic training – he did it via Zoom, during the pandemic.
“He’s so young, he doesn’t know what a DVD player is,” says his colleague PC Steve, who is in his thirties. That’s probably old enough for retirement in today’s power.
Even retired cops are deceptively youthful, as PC Will discovered when he stopped a middle-aged female driver to give her a breath test. She said she stopped to let him through. He said she was swinging erratically.
The first suspicion that this wasn’t a soft-haired church lady on her way home from the knitting circle came when PC Will asked her to wait in his car while the breath test was being prepared. The woman calmly noted that this was not necessary. Looking stunned, Will added that she herself had been a member of the police force. For 30 years.
In fact, she had just retired as a Detective Inspector in the Security Investigations Department [SIU]†
PC Will’s prime suspect was the real-life version of Jane Tennison, Helen Mirren’s character in Prime Suspect.
“That was uncomfortable,” he muttered, sending her on her way. Well, with a little more experience, he learns to recognize an old buyer at a glance.
Julius Roberts, 25, has a small flock of sheep and a disturbingly careless attitude to tradition
At 26, PC Sophie is already a veteran. She has developed a technique for calming drunks on Friday evenings when they have time to show off: she listens to those who brag.
She laughs at his jokes, he tells her how his friends think he’s a legend, and within minutes he’s completely forgotten that he wants to hit someone.
PC Sophie may think she’s invented the trick, but sadly women have been doing this to drunk husbands for ages. “It’s not much different than babysitting,” she said.
But make no mistake, these young officers do heavy work. Some of the adrenaline-filled phone calls were mirrored scenes in The Responder, Martin Freeman’s BBC1 drama about a patrol officer on night shift.
Like his character, they mainly deal with crime rather than prevent it. Some of the incidents we saw in this first episode ended in arrest, but none led to prosecution.
Former chef Julius has a small farm in Dorset
Farmers are also looking younger and younger, if former chef Julius Roberts and his brothers are any indication, in A Taste Of The Country (C5).
This half-hour series combines country food and stories from life on Julius’ small farm in Dorset. At 25, he has a small flock of sheep and a disturbingly careless attitude to tradition.
It didn’t seem to bother him that after shearing, he had little benefit from the furs: “Today wool has little to no financial value,” he grinned.
Julius was proud of the dinner diaries his late grandmother had left him, containing her favorite recipes.
He showed us a picture of her and told us she was ‘a very special lady’, but didn’t think to mention her name. She was just ‘grandma’.
Very young people often forget that older generations are real people too.