Scriptwriters for Incident Room Briefing Meetings

because the whole business wastes far too much valuable police time and there is never enough work available for talented young scriptwriters.

you know the scenario, there’s been a murder or something and the first thing the police do (well, after taking statements, forensic testing, drinking several cups of tea and making strange chalk pentagons and diagrams on the floor) - is to get altogether in one room to discuss how they are going to proceed; one middle management plod will make an introduction regarding what has occurred, a second middle management plod will describe the events leading up to it, a third higher-up management plod will name any likely suspects and what line of enquiries they will make; he might get to pin a few photos up on the blackboard.

a fourth psychologist type will describe the profile of the likely suspect; how old he is, how he lives alone or with a family or with his mother, has shoulder length hair, blue eyes and ate baked beans for lunch. penultimately, the second middle management plod will most likely bark out which inferior type plods will be making the house-to-house enquiries and which will be making the tea and running out for cheese and pickle sandwiches.

finally the first middle management plod will enquire at the top of his voice why the feck are they still sitting there on their backsides and not getting out there to make an arrest or words to that effect.

now all of this requires meticulous planning and writing and re-writing to a very tight schedule and so it is conceptualised that courses could be run for people interested in writing these very specialised scripts and thereby freeing up police time for real detective work (oh, I said that already – sorry!). these scriptwriters would need to be trained in the use of police jargon and forensic terminology and fillings for sandwiches. they would need to know policework intimately and the minutiae of detective culture such as uniformed police and CID having different working languages. e.g. uniformed policeman refer to their higher ranking officer as ‘Sir’ whereas CID refer to their senior as ‘Guv’ whether male or female I believe.

without these scripts, these crime-briefings could become quite ugly as different ranks vie with each other for the cream of the dramatics, fight over who gets to describe the forensic results or the grisly bits.

after all is said and done, promotion might depend on who might be in the audience.