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The Commander - daftest TV police officer ever?

Amanda Burton as Clare Blake in The Commader
  • Posted at 1:16pm
  • 18 November 2008
  • by AlisonGraham-RT

Towards the end of The Commander, which cast a long shadow across three nights on ITV1, Commander Clare Blake of New Scotland Yard shook her head as tears filled her eyes: "Why did I do it… why did I do it?" I'll tell you why you did it, Clare. You did it because you're an idiot.

Clare Blake must be the daftest TV police officer in history: previously, she's had sex with suspects in murder investigations; in this opus she snatched back a child she thought was stolen, only to find - hey ho, what do you know - it wasn't stolen after all.

What has always annoyed me about The Commander, apart from the glaring black holes in its plots, is the portrayal of a woman in power. Blake (a chilly Amanda Burton) is thrown hither and yon by her emotions (the having sex with suspects and the snatching of blameless babies).

Commanders have to be cool, they have to step back and they have to consider, calmly. But no, Clare Blake, because she is a girl, behaves like a slightly better dressed character from High School Musical, getting soppy over boys and babies. I can just imagine a whole section of The Commander's audience nodding their heads sagely and going: "Yes, women are like that, you know. They can't be trusted to hold positions of authority because they are so mimsy."

And dear me, did everyone have to be so horrible? And why did they have to SHOUT? This was particularly painful when Jennifer Ellison and Crissy Rock, playing a scheming mother and daughter, got going. It felt like someone was smashing bottles against my ears.

The actual plot was a slender thing, involving the stealing of a newborn baby from a maternity ward. Said baby just happened to belong to that charmless windbag Det Chief Insp Doug James and his dreadful wife. It turned out the moppet had been given to a very nice couple by the Crissy Rock character, who was running an adoption racket. I ended up feeling sorry he'd had to go back to his real parents.

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