This extended look at a gun-based standoff is stark, emotional TV which says as much about policing as the UK’s mental-health crisis. It’s quite a step-change from tidings of comfort and joy
For those of you who have already had enough tidings of comfort and joy this season, please welcome an extended and particularly bleak episode of 24 Hours in Police Custody – Block Under Siege. Settle in for a resoundingly depressing 90 minutes with the Bedfordshire police, two hostage takers, a plethora of weapons – including that seasonal staple, an air rifle modified to give it lethal force – and a battery of mental health issues to aggravate the situation.
The 14-hour armed standoff on the eighth floor of a Bedford tower block began after 37-year-old Nathan Turner and his 45-year-old friend Paul Burton took exception to how long a delivery driver had kept them waiting for their food order, which they also found to be incorrect when it arrived. “He stole my salad and the heat from my takeaway,” said Turner during a livestream of his activities to Facebook. So they trapped him in the block’s lift for two hours and started threatening neighbours with a weapon. “It was not really proportionate,” says Supt Steve Ashdown, who oversaw what was about to become a daylong siege as Turner and Burton barricaded themselves inside the former’s flat. Which is one very police officer-y way of putting it.
24 Hours in Police Custody is on Channel 4.
