He Kills Coppers is a three-part television drama, broadcast on ITV between 23 March and 6 April 2008. The drama stars Mel Raido, Liam Garrigan and Rafe Spall, and involves the death of three police officers during the celebrations of the 1966 World Cup. The story explores the three men most connected with the deaths. The drama is based on the best-selling novel by Jake Arnott. The series was subsequently released on DVD on 7 April 2008.
Critical reception
Nicholas Blincoe of The Guardian said of the series: "This Easter Sunday, ITV unveil a three-part crime drama based on Jake Arnott's novel He Kills Coppers. The promo material describes the story as a sequel to The Long Firm, Arnott's first novel, adapted by the BBC with a starring role for Mark Strong. It is not really a sequel. The only character that crosses between both novels is the journalist Tony Meehan, the most viciously closeted homosexual ever to appear in fiction. Denial leads Meehan into repression, which swiftly leads to murder, and on to an overheated obsession with another killer; Billy Porter, the "He" responsible for all the copper killing. It is only through his obsession that Meehan finally reaches the ultimate evil: he becomes an author of true crime books. He Kills Coppers sets out where the earlier novel ends, though there is a degree of overlap. The story begins in 1966, with the Metropolitan Police's clean-up of Soho ahead of the World Cup. This seedy backdrop may sound very Harry Starks, the charismatic villainous of The Long Firm. But He Kills Coppers moves on to follow a 20-year manhunt for the killer, Billy Porter. Jake based Billy on real-life killer, Harry Roberts; still in prison almost 40 years after the shooting of three policemen in West London. Roberts' murders inspired a song: "Harry Roberts is our friend, he kills coppers", sung on football terraces to the tune ofLondon Bridge is Falling Down. He Kills Coppers is a terrific book, definitely unbalanced, but only because it so ferociously ambitious: it tells the history of British policing in the crucial period between the bent 1960s and the politicised 1980s, ending with the so-called Battle of the Beanfield, an attempt to stop travellers entering Wiltshire. Jake uses a bold fictional device to hold all this history together. A device so bold it demands a spoiler alert."
