There’s a certain Margaret Mahy quality to the latest series of Dog Squad, TV One, Mondays: The Snake in the Panelbeaters and The Burglar Who Needed To Go Wee-Wees.
These true and rather alarming cases are not really the stuff of children’s books, despite the starring role of brave and clever animals. Aside from the doggy-adorableness factor, the thing that sets Dog Squad apart from the other rather voyeuristic reality police/customs/medical shows is the sheer novelty of the situations encountered.
The first case was of a Cantabrian bashed in the head by a baseball-bat-wielding intruder who climbed into his house through a second-storey balcony.
Police dog Brock and handler Lyal tracked the man down 15 minutes later, partly by Brock picking up a trail of what proved to be urine. The would-be burglar, later jailed for six years, had experienced bladder failure on the run.
His on-the-spot denials lacked a certain credibility given that Brock was barking at him with great authority. You didn’t need to speak german shepherd to translate the “that’s your perp!”
Later, a beady-eyed Primary Industries Ministry inspector had identified an alarming quantity of shed snake skins in a panelbeater’s shop, concluding that a reptile had sneaked in through a consignment of car parts. Customs’ reptile-sniffing staffy-cross called Diesel disappointingly didn’t find the illegal alien. His colleague Karma the labrador intercepted $2000 worth of ecstasy powder at the airport, while Aysa the german shepherd kept some LSD and cannabis out of prison.
All these public servants ask for, by way of performance bonus, is a game of tug and a tummy rub.
Meanwhile, TV One is running a new series of Lynda La Plante’s Above Suspicion, Saturday, featuring the ethereal Kelly Reilly as police heroine Anna Travis on the track of ever-nastier, more twisted villains. La Plante never economises on gore or cruelty, and accordingly the series opens with a globally fugitive drug dealer having his face remodelled and murdering the surgeon with a jab of deadly chemical to the carotid for his troubles.
From there on in, things get really dark with the return of the villain to Travis’ patch. This is merely bog-standard, if well-produced, British crime drama, which suffers mostly from the difficulty of believing in the efficacy of the chipper, bustling Travis.
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