DO you know your OCG from your SFC? Your DCS from your ACC? How about your FME from your SIO?
Well if you’ve spent the past five Sunday nights glued to Line of Duty - and who hasn’t? - you should be pretty down with the police lingo by now. If you’re not au fait (or should that be AF?) with all the acronyms Ted Hastings (CO of AC-12) and his colleagues throw at us each week, you might as well be watching it in Japanese.
I confess I struggle to keep up. It’s the TV show everyone’s talking about, and on Sunday night several million of us will watch the BBC1 police drama reach its dramatic conclusion in a feature-length episode.
It’s been a gripping series, but what with all the police ranks (DI, DCS, DCC etc) and roles (TFC, CSE, UCO etc), codewords like ‘Fahrenheit’ and ‘Status Six’ and other abbreviations, from ARU to SCG, trying to work out what they’re on about can leave you with a headache.
Even OCG - something we hear a LOT in LoD - doesn’t mean what I thought it did. I’ve discovered it stands for Organised Crime Group, not Gang as I’d assumed.
It doesn’t help that I’ve usually had a beer or two by the time Line of Duty comes on, but sometimes I’m wondering what’s going on, and who all these people in the police actually are.
I’ve never been the brightest spark when it comes to following TV dramas and films that require some concentration. An ex once threatened to leave me if I paused the DVD to ask one more question during The Usual Suspects. I watched all three Lord of the Rings films at the cinema and I still don’t have a clue what any of it was about.
But, having invested time and effort into Line of Duty, I’ll see it through. And, as the closing credits roll on Ep6, no doubt I’ll be left wondering who ‘H’ really is...
* HOW lovely to read that eight-year-old Joseph Cunningham has been honoured for his fundraising for Marie Curie. The youngster decided to help the Bradford hospice after a maintenance worker gave him a token for a free hot chocolate when he was visiting his grandad there. Joseph set himself a target to raise £50 and went on to raise over £2,000 for Marie Curie. Last week, at the charity’s awards ceremony in London, he was named Young Fundraiser of the Year.
Anyone who has visited a loved one at Marie Curie’s Bradford hospice will know what the fundraising mean to people who are terminally ill and their families. My dad spent his final weeks at the hospice and I was struck by what a strangely uplifting place it is. Thanks to a wonderful team of staff, from nurses to the maintenance man who chatted with Dad about their shared love of rugby union, the hospice made a huge difference to his end-of-life care.
The care doesn’t end when your loved one has died. Joseph’s mum, Cira Cunningham, told the T&A: “Without Marie Curie we would have been completely lost, and since the death of my father they have continued to support us.”
When my dad died, they continued to offer us support us too. Even when I visited the hospice two years later, for work, and had to catch my breath as I thought of the last time I was there, a senior nurse put her arm around me and said: “Are you alright?” It was like being wrapped in a blanket.
The hospice is a marvellous place. And, thanks to fundraisers like Joseph Cunningham, it makes a dreadful time more bearable. As actor Stephen Mangan said, when he met the Bradford youngster at the Marie Curie awards: “If we all tried to be a bit more like Joseph, the world would be a better place.”
* WHAT fuss about a primary school that plans to slaughter its pigs to teach children where meat comes from.
Farsley Farfield Primary has come under fire for planning to kill the Gloucestershire Old Spot pigs, potentially "traumatising" children who have helped to rear them.
I'm a vegetarian but have no problem with meat that's humanely farmed. At least this way, as headteacher Peter Harris says, children will learn about food provenance and animal welfare, which has got to be better than going through life turning a blind eye, as many meat-eaters do, to the horrors many animals endure before they end up as processed food. Give children some credit. I reckon they can be pretty pragmatic about where meat comes from.
* LINE of Duty star Vicky McClure takes on a different TV role tonight, in BBC1's Dementia Choir. The actress embarks on a personal journey to discover how music helps people live well with dementia. "The stimulation for singing or listening to music... makes people with dementia feel good about themselves," she says.
When my mum, who sang in choirs most of her life, was ravaged by dementia, the one thing she had left was music. She could no longer sing, but listening to music sparked something in her soul and made her face light up.
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