Representations of British Probation Officers in Film, Television Drama and Novels 1948-2012

AuthorMike Nellis
Pages5-23
5


           

Abstract This paper offers an overview of representations of the British probation service
in three fictional media over a sixty year period, up to the present time. While there were
never as many, and they were never as renowned as representations of police, lawyers and
doctors, there are arguably more than has generally been realised. Broadly speaking -
although there have always been individual exceptions to general trends - there has been a
shift from supportive and optimistic representations to cynical and disillusioned ones, in
which the viability of showing care and compassion to offenders is questioned or mocked.
This mirrors wider political attempts to change the traditionally welfare-oriented culture of
the service to something more punitive. The somewhat random and intermittent
production of probation novels, films and television series over the period in questions has
had no discernible cumulative impact on public understanding of probation, and it is
suggested that the relative absence of iconic media portrayals of its officers, comparable
to those achieved in police, legal and medical fiction, has made it more difficult to sustain
credible debates about rehabilitation in popular culture.
 !"
One of the problems the Probation Service has is that it is not very photogenic. We live
with an image driven media and society and unfortunately probation doesn’t present itself
well, certainly on television. There is something about learning to play the media in a way
that suits our needs and trying to accept that we are not like the police, we are not like
prisons, we don’t look good on television, so we actually need to play to our strengths and
to give an impression of an organisation that knows what it is doing and has a very hard-
headed realistic approach to crime management. Christine Lawrie, Chief executive of PBA
(quoted in Fletcher 2007:9)
The work of Probation Trusts is particularly open to misrepresentation. Some of you may
have watched the recent BBC drama, ‘Public Enemies’. This was drama, not documentary,
and therefore no closer to the re al life of probation staff than the body count among staff
at Holby General in ‘Casualty’ is a true representation of life expectancy in the NHS. The
difference, however, is that we all have our own experience of doctors and nurses that
British Journal of Community Justice
©2012 Sheffield Hallam University, Sheffield
ISSN 1475-0279
Vol. 10(2): 5-23
Nellis
6
allow us to put the drama in perspective, whereas the great majority of people have no
source of information about what probation does other than what they read and what
they see on TV. Those of us who know could simply sigh resignedly at the ninth or tenth
serious misrepresentation of probation practice in the first episode: others are likely to
have believed what they saw (Graham Nicholls (2012), retiring Chief Officer, Lincolnshire
Probation Trust)
The representation of criminal justice officials in the media - both news media and
entertainment media - has been a legitimate subject for academic enquiry since the
1970s. There had been literary critical studies of the crime fiction genre well before this,
which commented, incidentally or directly, on those criminal justice occupations that were
covered in such literature - police officers, private detectives, lawyers, sometimes
psychiatrists - but no studies of the same occupations in film or television, despite their
predominance in post-war cinema and broadcasting. This changed in the 1970s, which
saw the emergence of cultural studies, and saw criminologists become interested in
sources of public opinion about crime and punishment, and in the impact of media
imagery on the legitimacy or otherwise of criminal justice agencies. A decade or so later,
as visibility in the media became progressively more unavoidable, both social work and
probation in England and Wales began to take a more systematic interest in its public
image, having made only intermittent, short-lived, forays into this field in the past
(Cousins 1987; Fry 1988; Maruna 2007). The following s urvey of fictional representations
of probation in Britain over a sixty year period, premised on the idea that a) ficti on is not
necessarily untruthful or unrealistic (though it may be), and that b) on some matters it can
frame and inform public understanding as much if not more than f actual data, is intended
to serve academic, media and probation interests. It is no more than an overview,
complementing studies of probation imagery in the news media (Byers 2008; Jewkes
2008), and some of the specific representations mentioned here warrant more detailed
analysis, and proper contextualisation in the time and place in which they were produced.
In the period since the end of WW2, the police and the private detective have been
predominant in all forms of crime fiction - literary, cinematic and televisual - mirr oring
and augmenting (in respect of the police if not the private eye) the dominance of police
stories in news media (press and television) (Reiner, Livingstone and Allen 2000). Within
the various and changing forms of police story it is possible to discern a vernacular history
of policing itself, and of changing police ideals - from the beat policing of local
communities in Dixon of Dock Green (BBC1955-1976), through the introduction of motor
patrols in Z-Cars (BBC 1962-1978), the emergence of regional crime squads in Softly, Softly
(BBC 1969-76), the war on London’s organised crime in The Sweeney (ITV 1975-1978) to
the emergence of the hero-pathologist and forensics expert, prefigured in The Expert
(BBC1968-1974) but more fully realised in Silent Witness (1996 onwards) and “cold case”
series like Waking the Dead (BBC 2000-2011), and in related (often American) television
programmes and novels Leishmann and Mason 2003; Reiner 2004). While the realism or
otherwise of such portrayals is always moot, certain fictional police officers have
nonetheless been touchstones in public debate about policing and it has never been
difficult to find examples in the press where reference to a television character is used as a

To continue reading

Request your trial

VLEX uses login cookies to provide you with a better browsing experience. If you click on 'Accept' or continue browsing this site we consider that you accept our cookie policy. ACCEPT