Honour Killings: Social and Legal Challenges in Turkey F. Tas Cifci. Abingdon: Routledge (2020) 238pp. £120.00hb ISBN 9781138348479
| Author | M. GORAR |
| Date | 01 September 2020 |
| Published date | 01 September 2020 |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1111/hojo.12387 |
The Howard Journal Vol59 No 3. September 2020 DOI: 10.1111/hojo.12386
ISSN 2059-1098, pp. 370–378
Book Reviews
You’reNicked: Investigating British Television PoliceSeries B. L amb. Manchester: Manchester
University Press (2019) 217pp. £80.00hb ISBN 978-1-5261-2585-9
In her groundbreaking work, Shots in the Mirror, Rafter (2006) argues that ‘whatever the
basis of their stories, crime films reflect the power relations of the context in which they
are made, [including] attitudes towards gender,ethnicity, race and class relations’ (p.21).
This is the terrain of Ben Lamb’s first book, You’re Nicked. Arguing that television schol-
arship on the British police series ‘primarily analyses the representation of police char-
acters as a measure of a programme’s ideology’ (p.7), he sets out to ‘change the academic
landscape’ (p.7) in two key ways. First, in addition to analysing representation of police
characters, he also explores depiction of the civilian characters in each series and their
reasons for committing crime; and, where appropriate, he links these representations to
key criminological theories. Second, he notes that many existing academic studies tend
to focus on how police officers are portrayed in their working lives as part of the public
world of work. Lamb suggests that academics have not always considered ‘the extent to
which the depiction of private domestic spaces can make an ideological contribution to
the genre’ (p.3) and his aim is to explore how representations of gender and social class,
within both public and private spaces, are articulated visually according to production
practices of the day.
In his study, Lamb analyses 16 popular British television police series from 1955 to
the present day. These series include Dixon of Dock Green (BBC, 1955–76) and ZCars
(BBC, 1962–78) to Happy Valley(BBC, 2014–), by way of The Bill (ITV, 1984–2010), Prime
Suspect (ITV, 1991–2006), and Life on Mars (BBC, 2006–7). Each chapter deals with a
different decade and is divided into three sections. The first section considers how the
visual style of the production frames the police station space in each series, and how it
is used ‘to depict the force’s institutional politics, its inner rivalries, and its ideological
stance towards preventing and solving crimes’ (p.8). The second section explores how
the civilian characters’ domestic spaces are framed, and the third section considers police
officers’ domestic spaces in order to understand to what extent ‘a series can intervene in
national debate by paying specific attention to the economic anxiety and social pressures
families were experiencing in relation to the fracturing post-war settlement and its impact
on class and gendered identities’ (p.8).
Chapter 1 looks at the 1950s and 1960s and examines how, in contrast to Dixon,Z
Cars was shot in real time by six simultaneously recording video cameras within a televi-
sion studio, allowing for a faster pace in storytelling. Only seven to ten minutes of each
episode were set in the station, with the bulk of each episode depicting civilians dwelling
in their homes. By far the largest proportion of character types that feature are working-
class men who commit crimes as a means of dealing with their inability to achieve status,
possessions, and wealth. Lamb uses deviant subculture theory and anomie to explore the
distinction repeatedly made in the episodes between characters’ goals and the obstacles
preventing them from achieving them.
Chapter 2 moves on to the 1970s. Lamb suggests that traditional genre studies grant
too much significance to The Sweeney (ITV, 1973–6) when discussing police series and
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