Q.3 How far does Cuffs adapt police drama conventions to fit its family audience at 8 p.m. on BBC1?
In your answer you must
- state what conventions you could expect from most TV police drama
- analyse the programme's use of genre conventions, making sure that you cover the whole episode (not just the extract played in the exam). This means explaining all the crimes that occur in the episode and everything that the police have to deal with that may be upsetting for viewers.
- explain who the audience is for Cuffs
- explain how far the programme adapted conventions
- draw conclusions about how far the extract adapts the conventions of police drama to fit its scheduling and audience
Cuffs adapts its police drama conventions to fit its target audience before the BBC watershed by using censorship and obvious slapstick humour to distract from the subtle adult humour.
The conventions from most police TV drama include brutal fight scenes, often bloody bodies, and crude language and themes. Cuffs avoids and adapts this using light censorship to keep the implications of certain events, and to keep enough adult humour to appeal to their target audience without being too explicit for children. An example of this would be the scene of an 'implied' murder, as we hear and know the struggle of a fight and killing, but it is not explicitly shown on screen - therefore not exposing children to too much gore and explicit content. This is also done for a more light-hearted scene at the start of the episode - when a naked man pushes a young man's face close to his privates. Throughout the scene, no explicit nudity is shown on screen beside the occasional naked buttock, which not only harks childish 'butt joke' humour for younger audiences, but 'shields' them from the more adult humour in the scene.
Continually, the slapstick humour in this scene may also be appealing to younger audiences, as the characters fight in a chaotic disorder - which creates excitement in the ridiculousness of the content. By using slapstick humour, Cuffs adapts certain conventions of 'brutal fights' in usual conventions, and censors the subtle adult humour while doing so. For example, references to sexual humour being the scene where the arrested women makes facial gestures towards a policeman almost immediately after being detained by him, which creates a comical contrast between her previous distressed attitude and her now flirtatious, bold advance - most likely in hopes of 'pleasing' her way out of jail. This creates subtle sexual humour for more adult audiences, while being absurd enough in contrast to be laughable to younger audiences, without fully disclosing her likely intentions to young children. This also censors the convention in police drama of sexual humour and references - as it keeps the convention there, but vague enough so that it may be suitable for younger audiences before the BBC watershed, which appears usually before the average child's bedtime.
(not done)
