Amber Melville-Brown discovers drama to enjoy but warns this is no replacement for independent legal advice

Traditionalists in the legal profession, from the comfort of their wood-panelled office, leather-bound book in hand, may bemoan the loss of the ‘writ’ in favour of the claim form. However, hot-desking modernisers may embrace the online version of the Civil Procedures Rules with open arms – while skimming the latest emails on their BlackBerrys.


Where do these two worlds collide? In the living room, apparently. Legal TV, ‘the law firm in your living room’, offers an insight into the legal world to eight million Sky viewers through the modern medium of satellite television. This month, ‘the UK’s only dedicated legal television station’, according to its publicity, has been elevated from specialist programmes in the depths of channel 885 to the heady heights of entertainment, at channel 215.


And your reviewer wasted no time in getting right up to date with its legal entertainment. What programme did she choose? The 1970s and 1980s legal drama, ‘Crown Court’.


I have to admit that long before I became a lawyer, or even knew what one was, I loved ‘Crown Court’. Now, its very name takes me back to the days when I would sit watching it with my grandmother, Siamese cat on lap and hand dipping in and out of her sweet tin. Was it the clipped intonations of the barristers, the over-acting witnesses, the amiable but oh-so-slightly supercilious judge that intrigued me? Perhaps it was just the sweet tin. Today, it may not swing viewers away from Judge John Deed, but it still retains a charm that those with a penchant for the past will find hard to resist.


But what is Legal TV doing with ‘Crown Court’? In fact, what is it doing at all? The answer seems to be that it is trying to demystify the law.


Legal TV attempts this through more than just re-runs of 30-year-old dramas. Programmes including ‘Your Law’, ‘Talk Legal’ and ‘Landmark Cases’ are aimed at educating the man on the Clapham Omnibus about the mystical subject. While the programmes will not turn viewers into lawyers, they may give an insight into legal scenarios and provide practical advice.


‘Landmark Cases’ aims to provide an update on cases that either substantially change the interpretation of or establish new case law. Presumably intended to cover the gamut of law on which the channel advises – consumer, health, motoring, travel, personal injury, property, family, employment, business and finance – this may be a pretty tall order. The series starts with a programme about Singh v Bhakar, a case concerning a Sikh woman who successfully sued her mother-in-law for abuse suffered during her arranged marriage. It includes a brief summary of the facts, discussion of the legal issues, interviews with the lawyers involved, and the views of commentators.


A programme like this cannot replace independent legal advice and Legal TV stresses that the channel includes a disclaimer, on screen and repeated by the interviewers, making this clear. But such programmes may whet the appetite of those in similar situations. The extent to which this will provide access to justice or will give a ‘heads up’ to myriad claimants wishing to take advantage of today’s compensation culture remains to be seen.


Hands-on legal advice is also available – yes, ‘Tesco law’ has become ‘Telly law’. Both ‘Your Law’ and ‘Talk Legal’ provide a platform from which viewers can have their specific queries answered on air by real lawyers, but there is the same caveat to viewers about the need to obtain independent legal advice.


The interviewers do not present in the style of Jeremy Paxman or his ilk and some of the experts appear less comfortable at being questioned than those we regularly see on ‘Newsnight’. We are so used to slick presentations these days that anything short of this can give a somewhat handmade look. However, while the sets may be a little small and stark (one imagines that beyond the facade we could actually be in someone’s living room) there are at least no shaky backdrops à la ‘Acorn Antiques’.


Legal TV will not cause much concern to the cinemas of Leicester Square or the makers of popcorn, but there is more entertainment than just ‘Crown Court’. ‘MDA’, featuring the Australian medical defence and indemnity organisation, attempts to bring legal entertainment up to date. Apparently, it deals with stories that negotiate their way through ‘ethical minefields and around litigious lawyers’. No stranger to the law after his successful libel battle against style magazine The Face, one of the leads is Jason Donovan, swapping his ‘Technicolor Dreamcoat’ for the more sombre threads of a medical litigator.


The aim of ‘Legal Brain’, a quiz show hosted by celebrity cartoonist Bill Tidy, is to set lawyers from around the country against each other in a battle, presumably to see who is the smartest (not to mention who is the most photogenic and entertaining). With the law finally muscling its way into reality TV, can we expect ‘I’m a lawyer, get me out of here’ or ‘Big Lawyer’ to be next on the list?


Indeed, the tag ‘The law firm in your living room’ may well generate images of George Orwell’s Big Brother. But while the television screens in the dystopian novel 1984 are intended to control the viewers, Legal TV may give its viewers the knowledge, tools and interest to take some control themselves.


Gazette readers live in a legal world. But it is a foreign land to many people. If Legal TV demystifies the law, providing access to justice to the television viewing masses, then one imagines that at least Lord Woolf would approve. Whether it serves lawyers’ interests to have the legal profession demystified is another matter altogether.


Amber Melville-Brown is a consultant at London-based law firm David Price and the Gazette’s media law columnist