Discuss The Changing Representation Of The Police In British Crime Series And Police Dramas.

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Discuss The Changing Representation Of The Police

In British Crime Series And Police Dramas

        According to the definition the Oxford School Dictionary, represent means “1) to show a person or thing in a picture or play etc. 2) to symbolize, stand for, 3) be an example or equivalent of something;” whereas representative is defined as “a person or thing that represents another or others”.  In this essay, I shall relate the definitions to various examples of police shows from the history of the police genre, and how they represent real police to us as an audience.  All media texts are constructed to make us think a certain way about any given subject and to convey certain views and opinions.  We, as an audience, are expected to suspend our disbelief and believe that the actors are real policemen and women.  For example if a police officer on TV breaks the rules we will believe that real officers also do.

        The Heinemann English Dictionary defines genre as “a style, variety or category especially in art, film and writing”.  In the Police/Crime genre the conventions and iconography we would expect in a police series/drama include the police uniform, police car and siren.  The locations we would expect to find in a police series/drama are a police station, where the main police characters would meet together- as they would meet in a pub or café if the series was a soap opera- and outdoor locations such as council estates as many police dramas are set in the inner city, although there are some exceptions for example “Juliet Bravo” which is set in the outskirts of the city and in the countryside. The characters we would expect to see are: good – the police - and bad – the criminals.  The narrative (main storyline) we would anticipate would be along the lines of a criminal commits a crime and the police catch and arrest the criminal.  Within the crime genre there are four different formats: the series, which is broadcast once or twice a week; the serial which is also broadcast once or twice a week, although the storylines carry on from episode to episode; the occasional drama where the single story is long and broken down into two or more parts, is not shown regularly, and the main characters are the same in each story; and the hybrid, in which the show has elements of other genres such as comedy, soap opera, horror etc, and have a large regular cast who play the central character from time to time.  The genre is a safe genre, in the sense that although there are criminals in the world, we know (or we believe) that the police will always catch the offender, which is not the case in the real world.

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The crime genre has changed immensely from when it began.  The first crimes that were published were gory crimes such as murders and hangings, which were initially published in eighteenth century broadsheets.  Crime fiction initially began in the 1820’s with the stories of Edgar Allen Poe, which were centred around crime in the inner city; which was extended through the century by the work of Arthur Conan Doyle, who created the character of Sherlock Holmes.  The crime genre was firmly established in the twentieth century by British writers such as Agatha Christie who wrote about crime within the middle ...

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