Screenplay: The Black and Blue Lamp (1988)

Back in 1950, Jack Warner had appeared as police constable George Dixon in Basil Dearden’s classic crime thriller The Blue Lamp who was preparing to retire after many years of service at Paddington Green police station in London. In time honoured fashion he was murdered before he could enjoy his much deserved retirement, gunned down by Dirk Bogarde’s thuggish Tom Riley during a bungled attempt to rob a cinema. But the character was resurrected by the BBC who cast Warner in the long-running (432 episodes) television series Dixon of Dock Green (1955-1976), his beat now relocated to a station in his new fictional eponymous London patch. Dixon and his colleagues at Dock Green left our screens in May 1976 but his name was well known enough in 1988 for Arthur Ellis to invoke his name for his brilliant satire, The Black and Blue Lamp.

It was broadcast as part of the BBC Two’s Screenplay strand, one of the last of the great anthology series of one-off plays that ran from 1986 to 1993. The contemporary Screen One (1989-1993) and Screen Two (1985-1994) strands tended towards more mainstream productions (though Screen Two was always a little more daring than its younger sibling) and Screenplay was commissioned to give a home to more experimental and avant garde work that the Screen umbrellas would find too challenging. Ellis had already written one play for Screenplay, Christine (broadcast on 23 September 1987) when the strand’s producer, Brenda Reid, found herself with a vacant 60 minute slot to fill that needed something that could be shot entirely on tape with no location filming. Ellis rose to the challenge and in record time came up with The Black and Blue Lamp.

It opens with a potted recap of the key events of The Blue Lamp, represented by footage from the black and white film. In 1949, PC George Dixon (Jack Warner) is gunned down by vicious cosh boy Riley (Dirk Bogarde) as the youth tries to flee a cinema robbery. Riley is tracked to the White City greyhound track in West London where he is arrested by Dixon’s colleagues and friends. Staying in black and white, The Black and Blue Lamp picks up with Riley (now played by Sean Chapman, Frank Cotton in Hellraiser (1987), doing a pretty good Bogarde impression) being escorted back to Paddington Green police station by the police, among them PC Hughes (Karl Johnson here, Meredith Edwards in The Blue Lamp). Once at the station, things take a very strange turn as Riley and Hughes suddenly fund their surroundings turned to colour – they’ve transferred from the monochrome fictional world of The Blue Lamp to the equally fictional 80s cop show The Filth. Riley and Hughes are suddenly adrift in a world that neither of them recognises, a world of bent coppers who are handier with their fists than their 50s counterparts, represented by hard-as-nails Inspector Cherry (Kenneth Cranham). In this fictional world (the real world, our world, never appears in the play) George Dixon was a wrong ‘un, under investigation by internal affairs department A10 for his part in a paedophile ring.

We – and Riley – get a good idea of where we stand when the now terrified cosh boy, stripped of much of his bravado,first encounters the brutish Cherry who responds to Riley’s request to see a lawyer with “In two minutes, I am going to cut off your bollocks with a Stanley knife.” In 1949, Riley was cock of the walk, a swaggering young thug full of confidence and ready with a gun to mow down anyone who stands in his way. In 1988, he’s just an amateur, a kid whose depravities have been out paced by the forces of law and order ranged against him. In 1949, a shocking act of violence had united London’s Metropolitan police in a manhunt to find the murderer of one of its own. In the world of The Filth, violence, or the threat of it, is just another tool in the average copper’s kit.

The timing of The Black and Blue Lamp was spot on. The 1980s had seen a steady erosion of trust in the police, particularly officers of London’s Metropolitan force. In 1977, the then head of the Met’s notorious Flying Squad – colloquially known as The Sweeney – Chief Superintendent Ken Drury was jailed along with 12 other officers for accepting bribes. Operation Countryman followed, a six year investigation into the workings of the Metropolitan police that ended in 1982, costing £3 million found that corruption was “historically and currently endemic” throughout all echelons of the force. Accusations of racism led to the Brixton and Broadwater Farm riots of 1985, the latter of which led to the death of PC Keith Blakelock and in 1987, private investigator Daniel Morgan was murdered after investigating police corruption over dealings with Maltese drug dealers. Although several inquiries failed to find any involvement by the police in Morgan’s death, the perception among the public was increasingly that the Metropolitan Police were institutionally racist and corrupt to the very core.

A couple of decades before, and something like The Black and Blue Lamp would have seemed so outlandish and provocative that it almost certainly would never have been broadcast. In 1988, the time travel element aside, it seemed all too horribly plausible. The honest, cheery copper personified by Jack Warner now seemed a distant memory, if indeed he ever existed at all. The Black and Blue Lamp suggests that if he did, his descendants are cut from very different cloth indeed.

Strong performances all round and some cutting wit in Ellis’ script helped to ease most viewers past some of the more outre plot developments and for those who saw the play on its one and only broadcast on 7 September 1988, its weirdness etched itself on the memory. Years later, some of its DNA was visible in the hugely successful Life on Mars (2006-2007) and its spin-off series Ashes to Ashes (2008-2010) which reversed the flow and had modern cope thrust back into the Wild West, frontier milieu of 70s and 80s policing. Ellis later wrote a sort-of companion piece for Screen One, The Police (1990) in which a bullied eleven year old schoolboy organises his classmates into an unofficial police force that gets out of hand after they taste real power for the first time.