Closing ranks

Closing Ranks is a 90-minute drama-documentary that focusses on the brutalising effects of a policeman’s job on his private and public life. Director Roger Graef based this programme on actual incidents. It follows the relationship between Detective Constable Rick Sneaden, played by Rob Spendlove, and his wife Shirley (Elizabeth Edmons). Shirley, exhausted and depressed by life in London persuades her husband to transfer to a country police station – and back into uniform. But the corrosive effects of the flashy, dangerous London policeman, inevitably lead to corruption and brutality.. at works and at home. Much if the script was improvised by the actors who were drilled by Roger Graef into almost becoming the characters they were portraying for the duration of the filming. Closing Ranks emerged from Roger Graef’s research for a book called Talking Blues about the stresses of modern policing. The two-year-long cover-up of the Holloway Road incident, in which a vanload of police beat up a group of innocent passing youths, led him to examine the power of police loyalty. It can stronger than all other moral obligations. Roger says “Closing Ranks is definitely not anti-police. It reflects some of the pressures afflicting the modern police community that are not understood by the public…nor those responsible for the police thenselves.