In defence of Broadchurch: drama should come before fact

http://www.theguardian.com/tv-and-radio/2015/jan/19/broadchurch-script-errors-dont-really-matter

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A novelist I know once received a letter from a reader complaining that the author’s book had been ruined for him at the moment the protagonist turned left at a central London street junction where that direction was prohibited. The author replied that this objection might be legitimate – and even prosecutable – if the passage had occurred in a travel book but that the London of a novel had no obligation to be the city of the A-Z: the point of made-up stories is that you can make things up.

In defiance of that mature view, what might be called the sat-nav approach to cultural criticism seems to have engulfed the second series of Broadchurch. Since the second episode was broadcast, there have been grumbles, spreading from social media to traditional media, about alleged implausibilities and errors in the scripts. These quibbles culminated in a two-page spread in the Mail on Sunday, headlined: It’s Criminal! Ten Reasons Broadchurch Has Totally Lost the Plot.

A panel of legal experts identified a string of “gaffes”, including the judge wearing the wrong wig, the Latimers being allowed to select the barrister they wanted, witnesses being allowed to stay in court to watch proceedings and a judge allowing Beth Latimer to be questioned about her sex life.

But this fact-checking approach is misguided in a specific sense with relation to Broadchurch and more generally when applied to any TV fiction.

In their criticism of Chris Chibnall’s scripts for the second series of his crime story, the judicial pedants are making the mistake of assuming that because something shouldn’t happen, it doesn’t. Ideally, cops should not pass on to national newspapers false slurs about the victims of a tragedy, but it has happened. The corrupt and violent police officers in Jed Mercurio’s Line of Duty should not be used as role models at Hendon police college, but the show was dramatising plausible worst possibilities.

Similarly, as the archives of the courts of appeal show, detectives, barristers and judges do sometimes behave in improper ways, and there is no obligation for Chibnall’s fictional members of these professions to follow correct procedure at all times; he may be choosing to show the worst that can occur in a trial. A dramatic story is not a court of law, even if it’s set in one.

And, in a broader sense, fiction is surely only obliged to be pedantically true to the real world if it is drawing attention to a particular issue. For example, a docu-drama about an A&E department shouldn’t show patients being kept on the floor for four days if this has never happened anywhere.

But, beyond that, the liberation of fiction in comparison to journalism is that the writer is free to compress, invent, simplify. Call the Midwife, for instance, would become extremely tedious if it felt bound to reflect the true length of labour every time a soon-to-be new mother arrived on screen.

Equally, crime fiction is only realistic up to a certain point – that point being that it should probably not turn out to be the case that the murderer was an extraterrestrial, or that a potential victim was saved by their guardian angel. That would shift the genre into science fiction or fantasy.

Also, for reasons of both budgetary and narrative economy, good drama needs to reduce the number of characters involved. In reality, it would have been the CPS who asked Charlotte Rampling’s retired barrister to take the Latimer case, but how interesting would such a scene be, featuring officials who never re-appear? Chibnall favours long dramatic dialogues, the rhythms of which would be ruined if, for example, the courtroom kept being cleared for legal argument in the absence of the jury.

The first duty of fiction is to drama not fact. Residents of Oxford in Inspector Morse and Lewis or of Midsomer in Midsomer Murders still routinely react in horror at the unexpected intrusion of murder into their communities whereas, if they were true to the back-story of these long-running series, those informed of the latest slaughter would express astonishment that anyone in the area was still breathing. The picky also sometimes complain that real murder teams do not use the same two coppers to interview every suspect, but it would be an unwieldy police show in which they didn’t.

Furthermore, the original Broadchurch – with which the second series is being unfavourably compared – was not a model of procedural realism. How many murder investigations have there actually been in which one of the investigating officers discovered that the killer was her husband? In reality, as soon as a detective’s close relative was a potential suspect, they would be recused. And, if a detective were suffering from the near-fatal cardiac condition that Chibnall used as one of DI Hardy’s plot-twists in the first run, the police HR department would, for obvious reasons of health and safety and duty of care, not allow him to return to work, even to remove him later. But whereas, in real police work, a replacement lead detective can be brought in, such a switch would be extremely irritating in a drama.

There are tenable reasons to have concerns about the second Broadchurch – such as that the first series was satisfyingly complete or that the dynamics of a court case have already been over-explored on TV – but the least of them is that it would be an imperfect teaching aid for police or legal colleges. And, as a portrait of a quiet community that has had to deal with only one terrible murder in a year, Broadchurch is arguably more realistic than most TV crime fiction.