NEW STREET LAW

BBC One

from Thursday 4 May, 8pm, for eight weeks

As if there were not enough of them already, a new legal drama, ‘New Street Law’, launches on BBC One this week. The all-star cast is headed by Scottish actor John Hannah, with Cold Feet’s John Thomson in the number-two slot.

The drama follows the fortunes of Hannah’s committed and talented working-class barrister Jack Roper, an upstanding fellow motivated by the ‘search for the truth’. Roper turned down a job with Manchester’s leading set to establish his own criminal defence practice from a set of grimy chambers in the city.


His trusty band of hard-up barristers includes Mr Thomson’s cheeky chancer Charlie Darling, a lawyer whose heart is in the right place but whose methods are not always strictly ethical, who injects an element of comedy into the series.


Roper’s set is fiercely competitive with the leading chambers, run by Roper’s former pupil master Laurence Scammel QC, played by Paul Freeman. Scammel is one of those well-to-do, pompous types who laments the fact that lawyers no longer speak Latin – and may ring a bell with many solicitor viewers. His scheming and ambitious wife, and their silver-spooned but idealistic daughter – who clearly has a thing for Roper – are also part of the set.


The series’ lead writer and co-producer Matthew Hall is a former criminal barrister, and it seems he has a point to make about various topical legal issues. The show is spattered throughout with references to how defence barristers are living on a shoestring, and the pupil barrister moans that he is saddled with £40,000 in student loans – putting the blame for his lack of income firmly on solicitors who are ‘taking the pupil barristers’ work for themselves’.


Indeed, one of the first scenes of episode one shows Mr Thomson’s character wheeling and dealing with a judge to sign off his costs – explaining why he cannot possibly travel second class and suggesting the judge gives him a lift in his government car.


The series promises to combine interesting weekly legal storylines with ongoing character development and interplay – and there is certainly enough sexual tension swimming around the courtroom to keep the scriptwriters busy.


The first episode intersperses Darling’s amusing defence of some shady timeshare fraudsters with Roper’s more serious case involving a teenage tearaway accused of arson, which has a nice twist at the end. All in all, it looks to be an entertaining series – though for some readers it may be a little too much like reality to provide any satisfactory escapism.