Adrian Dunbar: Woke fear of being called racist is stopping the police from doing their job

Telegraph

7 days ago

I first see Adrian Dunbar pacing up and down one of those impossibly pretty cottage-lined streets you only get in Highgate. He's left his wallet on the bus. The bus in question is looping the village and he is hoping to catch it on its return journey. The 214 duly whizzes by and Dunbar chases it to the bus stop.
Seconds later he returns triumphant, wallet held aloft, having been handed to the driver. 'Everyone cheered!' he says with the euphoric relief that only finding a lost wallet or phone can bring, and as we finally go to sit down, I half expect him to say, 'Now we're sucking diesel,' in the manner of Line of Duty's Ted Hastings – a line now such a part of the national consciousness it graces novelty coffee cups.
We've met in one of Highgate's best known pubs, although Dunbar, who has lived here for years with his wife, the Australian actress Anna Nygh (they have a daughter together, Madeleine, also an actress), lets slip that real Highgate people drink in the Prince of Wales up the road. 'Only tourists come here,' he says.
As if on cue, a couple approach him while he is having his photograph taken for The Telegraph. Dunbar, who is virtually public property these days thanks to his role as head of an anti-police corruption unit in Jed Mercurio's much-adored police procedural, never minds when this happens. Very often they are women. Line of Duty made him a bit of a sex symbol – never underestimate the power of a man with an implacable moral compass – and although Dunbar, 66, isn't classically handsome, he has a hint of rascally debonair charm, holding my eye and talking with a lopsided half smile. Most people are very nice, he says airily.
Most of them also ask him the same question, which is: is Line of Duty coming back? So is it? 'Oh, it's definitely coming back,' he says. 'Some time next year. We're just waiting for the BBC to announce it.' For sure? Dunbar has form in this department, having announced Line of Duty's imminent return several times in the last few years, only for tumbleweed to issue forth from the BBC. 'I know Jed [Mercurio] is writing. And Martin and Vicky [Compston and McClure, who play Hastings's unflappable sidekicks, Steve and Kate] are very keen.' I'll take that as a yes.
In the meantime, Dunbar is about to appear in a second series of ITV's brooding crime drama Ridley, in which he plays the eponymous jazz-crooning, officially retired cop who keeps popping back into the office whenever a case sparks his interest. Like so many male TV detectives of a certain age, Ridley is a solitary and badly damaged chap, ransacked by grief over the death of his wife and teenage daughter in a fire – and spent most of series one haunted by their shadow.
Hastings was similarly emotionally bereft, drowning in debt following a divorce and living in a miserable Travelodge, and Dunbar, a master of quiet understatement, excels at playing this sort of man: outwardly successful and holding it together while privately in despair. Why does he think so many men in middle age tamp down their unhappiness in such ways, and why is he so drawn to playing such characters?
'I think men are born with an understanding of their expendability,' he says, in his light, plain-speaking Northern Irish burr. 'Women have these crucial rites-of-passage moments in their lives, to do with their ability to have children. But men don't have the equivalent. And that tends to manifest itself in a kind of amorphous, undefinable grief. Women are very good at talking about pain because they experience it quite a bit. But men are inarticulate on this. You can't define what the feelings are if you don't quite know where they're coming from.'
Ridley is certainly saturated in a vague, rainy British melancholy. It's set in a run-down town north of Manchester, where vertiginous house-lined streets back onto bleakly beautiful hills, and where a general air of deprivation clings to the concrete.
Dunbar, a working-class boy himself, describes this post-industrial landscape as home to 'the first working classes in the world' thanks to its pivotal role in the industrial revolution, and loves filming there. 'There's a feeling of disenfranchisement in many of these northern towns since Brexit,' he says. 'But there is also so much go-ahead energy. You get the sense that if they could just sort out the TransPennine Express, the whole area would take off.'
People want to think someone incorruptible is in charge
Dunbar is not at all concerned that, in swapping one policeman for another, he's in danger of becoming type cast. 'Police procedurals are the meat and potatoes of TV,' he says cheerily. 'Unless you're doing a cop, you're probably not doing a lot of work.'
It's unlikely Dunbar needs to worry much on that score these days. Since Line of Duty he's been busy – appearing in the psychological TV thriller Blood, and the British film Emily, about the Brontë sisters. Last year he starred – somewhat unexpectedly, but to rave reviews – in the musical Kiss Me Kate, although he is naturally musical: he spent his teenage years in a country trio in Enniskillen, still plays in a band from time to time and performs the songs Ridley sings himself.
Yet he knows it is the role of Supt Hastings for which he is forever destined to be known. 'During lockdown, when the Tories were dancing and having parties, people saw Line of Duty and thought, surely somewhere there are people who, despite what it might mean to their careers, are willing to do the right thing?' he says. 'I think that's why so many people gravitated towards Ted. Because they wanted to think there was someone in charge who is incorruptible, like he is.'
Certainly one reason why the epochal Line of Duty – which ran for six series between 2012 and 2021 and whose finale attracted a record 12.8 million views – won audience hearts is because it said so much about what we value as a nation. In confronting institutionalised corruption within the police force, it seemed to speak directly to our horror at the moral decay infecting our greatest civic institutions, with the final series coinciding with the investigation into Partygate at No 10 during lockdown, a scandal that eventually forced Boris Johnson's resignation.
The AC12 unit run by Hastings became such a byword for ethical integrity, it was co-opted by the campaign group Led By Donkeys in two spoof videos featuring the team interrogating Johnson and the then Met Police commissioner Cressida Dick, with Dunbar even 'asking' Dick in Hastings's iciest tones: 'Who does the Metropolitan Police work for, ma'am? Our citizens? Or Boris Johnson?'
'Yes, Cressida Dick was not a fan of Line of Duty,' says Dunbar. 'We did that spoof and saw her off [Dick resigned in 2022 after losing the confidence of Sadiq Khan over her handling of misogyny and racism within the force]. We certainly didn't lose any sleep over that,' says Dunbar.
He agrees that public trust in the police is waning. 'It happened a long time ago. Particularly in certain parts of London, such as Tottenham [which erupted into riots in 2011 after Mark Duggan was shot dead by police]. And its clear racism in particular is a problem that comes from the top, it's institutionalised, and I don't know how you get rid of it. The Met needs to clean up its act, and pretty quickly as well. Because the scandals have been coming thick and fast.
'But the Louise Casey report also showed how the police fear being branded racist when it comes to solving certain crimes. It's stopping them from doing their job. That's the other end of it, and I suppose you'd call it wokeness. It's closing certain things down.'
He is more scathing of politicians. 'I don't see many vocational politicians these days. I think Starmer is a man of integrity, but I don't think he really gets Westminster. He came from the DPP [director of public prosecutions].
'There are certain people who, once they get into power, think it's their own personal fiefdom.' He raises his voice. 'But where is this attitude coming from? Because it certainly didn't seem to be there in the Sixties and Seventies and Eighties. These days, it seems to be that you get a ministerial post and you think you can do whatever the heck you want. You might take the headmasters and headmistresses of the top 50 or 60 schools, and sit them down and ask them, 'How come they're turning out so many unpatriotic young men and women without a sense of civic duty?' Because the whole individualism [infecting modern culture] is amazing.'
He is less than impressed by his current MP, Tulip Siddiq, who was forced to resign from the Treasury following growing pressure over an anti-corruption investigation in Bangladesh. Siddiq has denied any wrongdoing.
Dunbar was born in Enniskillen in 1958 to a Catholic family, and was the eldest of seven children. His father was a carpenter and his mother a housewife. Although his childhood coincided with the worst of the Troubles, the violence didn't affect Enniskillen until years later, in 1989, with the Remembrance Day bombing. 'It's a tragedy, because that's what people remember Enniskillen for now,' he says. 'But I had an idyllic childhood in many ways. You know, fishing on the lake, a really good community spirit.'
In the early 1970s, however, his family moved for a few years to Portadown, which by that point had become a political flashpoint. 'Everything kicked off. There was a lot of rioting. They just took over the housing estates, built the barricades and everything. But as a small kid it was very exciting. At that age you think, 'Oh wow, what's going on?', you know? You're not really aware that the adults are extremely worried. And of course [being Catholic] we were stopped by the Army all the time.'
He stops, either unwilling to make more of this than necessary, or keen not to be tarred by a broad brush, and fixes me with a stare. 'I don't want you saying that I had a terrible childhood because of the Troubles, or that they psychologically damaged me, because they didn't.'
They did, however, politicise him. His family were moderate nationalists, but Dunbar is explicit about what he considers the failings of Westminster to create a stable, united Ireland after the worst of the Troubles. 'The great tragedy for me was that it could have all been settled so much quicker had the British government not allowed unionism to stand in the way of progress all the time in the 1970s,' he says.
'They could have sorted it out with the Sunningdale Agreement [which attempted to establish a power-sharing agreement involving a Northern Ireland Assembly and a Council of Ireland but which collapsed following Unionist violence]. Instead that became a template for the Good Friday Agreement. Anywhere where you've divided and conquered and then you simply walk away without really organising the peace or the truth, you create an intractable problem.
'Westminster has a responsibility for these areas so therefore should be acting in a responsible fashion to resolve them. But it was only after the Americans got involved with Northern Ireland that we ended up with our peace process, and the Good Friday Agreement, which I'm glad to say, is still holding.'
He believes unification is happening by proxy. 'The nerve that's been cut between the North and the South is gradually growing back. There are all these cross-border initiatives, such as roads and bridges. It adds up to peace by stealth. And I think the DUP [Democratic Unionist Party] are slowly losing control of their constituency at the moment [a survey earlier this year suggested support for unity in Northern Ireland had risen from 27 per cent to 34 per cent since 2022]. They're fabulous at cutting off their nose to spite their face, and they've been doing it for years,' Dunbar says.
He also dismisses the idea that the recent anti-immigration riots in Ballymena unleashed a violence in the country that had never gone away. '[That sort of riot] is all about housing. Providing somewhere for people to live is part of any government remit, and they're really suffering for it in the south of Ireland now as well. And if people had somewhere to live, the focus wouldn't turn to the immigrants coming in. No, the big problem [preventing a united Ireland] is that we still have a segregated school system in Northern Ireland whereby Protestants and Catholics are educated separately. You can never build a shared society under that system.'
'The middles classes struggle as much as everybody else'
Dunbar always wanted to be an actor or a musician. Alongside his country music trio he also worked as an Elvis impersonator, and joined an amateur dramatic group in his home town while also taking a part-time job in an abattoir. Someone in that group wrote off for an application for him to audition for the Guildhall School of Music and Drama in London, so he applied, encouraged by his mother, who had had unrealised ambitions in that area herself.
'She was a great singer and a very good actress, and she really wanted me to do something in that line, so when I won a place she was very happy,' he says.
He was in his second year at Guildhall, where he was studying music and drama, when his father died suddenly from a brain haemorrhage, in 1979. 'My mother had to look after all the kids. And that was obviously very tough, very tough for her, but she just went out and worked.'
All the same, had that person not sent off for his application, Dunbar would probably still be working in that abattoir. He said in a recent interview that his greatest disappointment was not coming from a class that understood how the world works. 'Actually we tend to think the middle classes get things easy,' he says now. 'But no, they don't. They struggle just as much as everybody else. But they do understand who you need to talk to to get ahead. They know about grants, how to fill in forms, how to access what's open to them. Whereas, if you're working class, you're probably brought up to think, 'Well, I'm going to work in a factory.''
He doesn't, though, think that this necessarily means the acting profession is dominated by middle-class actors. 'I think this whole business of posh people within acting is ridiculous. At one point, a whole bunch of really brilliant actors came out of the public schools [including Eddie Redmayne, Damian Lewis, Tom Hiddleston and Benedict Cumberbatch who all went either to Eton or to Harrow]. And if people are brilliant actors, it's undeniable. It doesn't matter where they come from.'
For a while after graduating he worked in Belfast before returning to London. He also co-wrote the 1991 film Hear My Song and starred in the internationally successful films My Left Foot and The Crying Game. Did he strike up a friendship with Daniel Day-Lewis on the former? 'No, not at all. He was in method all the time.'
Dunbar also appeared in the odd TV show, including Jimmy McGovern's Cracker, and A Touch of Frost and developed his obsession with the work of Samuel Beckett – he hosts a biannual Beckett festival in Liverpool and Paris. Along the way he met his wife – who had a son, Ted, from a previous relationship – after they were set up on a blind date by the late Val Kilmer 's ex-wife Joanne Whalley. They married in 1986. She appears in his Beckett productions and the couple has three grandchildren. 'They've been up at the house splashing about in the pool,' says Dunbar. 'I'm completely devoted.'
It's odd to hear a note of soppiness in Dunbar's voice: although he is entirely charming, he also has an implacable, steely moral conviction at his core. He is not afraid to speak his mind. Sometimes his directness risks coming across as terse. Yet he also worries that perhaps we obsess too much about corruption and violence, and conflict and rising crime rates.
At heart he has immense faith in human nature. 'Look, I lost my wallet today. The people on the bus held on to it and I got it back. I did two weeks' jury service recently, and I was so impressed by the people on the jury. People are decent. It's a country full of good people. And we have to start getting the message out that people are innately good.'