There's a poem by Norman MacCaig called Brooklyn Cop that tackles the question of what it must feel like to be a policeman who has to leave his house every day and face the risk of being hurt or killed.
There's a poem by Norman MacCaig called Brooklyn Cop that tackles the question of what it must feel like to be a policeman who has to leave his house every day and face the risk of being hurt or killed.
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Mark Smith
"Who would be him," asks the poem, "gorilla with a nightstick, whose home is a place he might, this time, never get back to?"
In its own way, the new drama Good Cop (BBC One, 9pm, Thursday) asks the same question: can an ordinary policeman stay normal when he pulls on a uniform and faces serious physical risk every day? And what kind of mental damage is done to a man who knows he might at any moment, in MacCaig's words, "plunge through into violence"?
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