The Hollywood star is playing a Liverpudlian officer on night patrol in The Responder, pinching cigarettes off corpses and eating their unfinished meals. How true to life is this? And how’s his Scouse accent?
If you assumed that every possible scenario in a TV police drama had been exhausted by now, then BBC One’s The Responder invites you to think again. It features Chris, a night patrol officer played by Martin Freeman, who answers a 999 from the nephew of an 85-year-old woman found dead on her sofa. When he arrives at the scene, he promptly takes a cigarette from the pack lying next to the dead body and smokes it. A vacuum flask of soup sits nearby. Might she have been poisoned? Chris obviously doesn’t seem to think so; peckish on the night shift, he scoffs the lady’s last supper while watching the TV show she left half-seen.
This macabre slapstick is realism not satire, says its writer, Tony Schumacher, whose 11 years as a first-response cop on Merseyside inspired the show.
