CALLING a show ‘Police Officers’ would be dull. So TV works hard to find alternative, cooler titles for pumping out the same old crap and ends up here:
Thief Takers (1995-97)
‘Bollocks, someone’s broken into the shed, I’d better call the thief takers,’ is a sentence nobody has ever uttered. They were a real thing, private individuals paid to capture criminals before an official police force was established in the 19th century. Which could have been an interesting premise for a show, as opposed to this generic Flying Squad shite.
Grafters (1998-99)
‘Graft’ is a word. ‘Hard graft’ is a phrase. ‘Grafters’ is not what we call builders, the focus of this ITV pensioner fodder starring Robson Green and Stephen Tomkinson. It’s as semantically confused as making a series about binmen called Binners.
Nightshifters (2019)
Nightshifts are common, and those doing them are invariably referred to as ‘the night shift’. Unless you believe this BBC Wales documentary series about the fascinating and mysterious world of cleaning offices and loading boxes into lorries. It claimed ‘Wales has the highest percentage of night-time workers of anywhere in the UK’. With a hook like that Hollywood must be bidding for the movie rights.
Bonekickers (2008)
Literally no one refers to archaeologists as this. Nor do they rampage through historical sites kicking bones, although Painstaking Rock Brushers would be equally clunky. Wanted to cash in on The Da Vinci Code but archaeologists don’t really have enemies, so ‘Christian extremists’ trying to suppress historical truths were invented. Nobody was convinced.
Blues and Twos (1993-97)
A title that sounds much more interesting than it is. ‘Blues’ refers to the blue lights on police cars, but what are the ‘twos’? Not a scatological reference, surely? Thankfully not – ‘twos’ are two-tone ‘nee-naw’ sirens, largely phased out when this documentary was on. Anyway it’s so dull it’s like making a documentary about airline staff entitled Ailerons.
The Alienist (2018-20)
Some twat of a writer must have thought he’d hit paydirt after scouring online thesauruses and finding this archaic term for a psychiatrist. In this cancelled Netflix show he’s a criminal psychiatrist, of course. It’s such a laboured attempt at a title you’d prefer the honesty of It’s About a Historical Psychiatrist Catching Murderers Please Watch This.
