British Television in the 1990s had become one of the most over-policed decades in the history of the medium, with The Chief, Waterfront Beat, Prime Suspect, Inspector Morse, Inspector Wexford, Chief Superintendent Adam Dalgliesh, Spender, Crocodile Shoes, A Touch Of Frost, Cracker, The Detectives (albeit a comedic offering), The Inspector Alleyn Mysteries, 99-1, Pie In The Sky, Wycliffe, Backup, Dangerfield (albeit to a limited degree), Crown Prosecutor (again, to a limited degree), Out Of The Blue, Thief Takers, The Knock (to a limited extent), City Central and The Bill dominating the schedules with a variety of maverick detectives, gruesome murders, police procedural dramas and corruption in the highest echelons of the force.



As the decade progressed, programme-makers endeavoured to approach the genre from every angle possible, some more successful than others, some proving to be spectacular failures. J C Wilsher, one of the most notable and consistently high-calibre contributors to Geoff McQueen's The Bill, was afforded the opportunity to branch out into his own serial when he joined forces with Tony Garnett's World Productions to devise and create Between The Lines, a slick new offering which spanned three series and cultivated an audience who became keenly addicted to the strength of the storylines and the conviction of the acting triad the series established.



Often nicknamed Between The Sheets owing to some of its more salacious content, the series concerned itself with investigations into endemic corruption in all the ranks of the police force, and explores the eternal question of the public's perception of the police force as the bastions of law, order and justice. Detective Superintendent Tony Clark (Neil Pearson), a morally ambiguous career-minded high-flyer, heads a unit of the Complaints Investigation Bureau (CID) which is required to "watch the detectives", as it were, and investigate possible avenues of corruption and the like at a variety of branches throughout the United Kingdom.



Thus, in many respects the series enjoyed strong storylines in the vein of Callan, Special Branch and The Sweeney in terms of its capacity to sustain soap-stylised storylines and content whilst featuring characters slipping undercover in order to acquire evidence against suspected corrupt officials. Clark was joined by Detective Inspector Harry Naylor (Tom Georgeson) and Detective Sergeant Maureen Connell (Siobhan Redmond), and between the three of them they successfully prosecuted their missions, though often the lines of distinction between corruption and bending the rules under the auspices of means and ends became frayed and blurred at the edges (often the characters would be placed in a moral dilemma between loyalty to the force and its officers, and their duty to ensure the letter of the law was observed, come what may).



The series opened with an episode concerning the team's endeavours to prove corruption with regard to Chief Superintendent John Deakin (Tony Doyle), a mission which they failed to successfully prosecute - and thus ensuring the power of a recurring villain in the first (and second) seasons of the programme. The prevailing mood that the higher the seniority, the higher and harder to prove the level of inherent corruption existed, proved palpable with audiences who flocked to the series in droves.

Its pioneering harder-edge, "in-your-face" realism, combined with the soap-stylised storylines which comprised the clash between professional and personal lives and priorities, ensured the series was ranked alongside the highly-regarded The Sweeney in terms of its achievements and dramatic framework. Further soap trimmings were exemplified by virtue of the fact that each series ended on a cliffhanger, though this became the sword upon which the programme would ultimately fall when its third and final season ended on an unresolved cliffhanger which failed to satisfy its audiences. The general consensus is that the programme "lost its way", as it were, during the third and final season, when Clark and Naylor ostensibly became international troubleshooters directed by the once-hated Deakin.

However, opinion is divided as others appreciated the power of the format to adapt to changing times and present the trio of leading characters now working above, alongside and beyond the confines and constraints of the law in order to survive (thus presenting a relative flip-side of the view presented in the opening episodes). Certainly, the third series had a far more lavish presentation (with the programme presented on a world stage as opposed to being confined to the United Kingdom), though audiences were left somewhat deflated when the final episode, concerning weapons exchanges with the IRA and Clark and Naylor's unfortunate implication with said exchanges, featured Mo looking on helplessly as the pair are trapped on a boat loaded with explosives, which is torn apart as they struggle to escape.

On the whole, however, Between The Lines succeeded in re-creating the mould of the standard police drama serial in such a way that it has become recognised as the pivtol serial of the 1990s (with programmes such as Prime Suspect and Cracker afforded the more high-profile recognition of mould-breaking drama productions with a police emphasis).

The series, which was produced by Peter Norris, had featured notable directorial turns from the likes of Alan Dossor, Roy Battersby, Richard Standeven and Ross Devenish, and attractive supporting performances from David Morrissey, Francesca Annis, John Shrapnel, Peter Postlethwaite, Neil Dudgeon, Ray Winstone, Michael Angelis, Jaye Griffiths, Kenneth Cranham, Keith Allen, Nicky Henson and Bernard Hill.

High-calibre writing contributions from J C Wilsher and Russell Lewis (experienced hands from The Bill), Rob Heyland (a notable contributor to The Knock and the creator of the enormously popular series The Vice) and Steve Griffiths (responsible for the ratings-busting Don Beech-Claire Stanton-John Boulton collection of episodes for The Bill) underlined the pedigree of the production, which was globally exported (becoming a notable prime-time fixture in Australia, to name but one country which firmly embraced the programme), and its commercial release extended to four VHS titles (comprising the first series of the programme) in the 1990s, several television tie-in novelisations and a soundtrack compact disc to accompany the series. The series is available on DVD.