Parminder Kaur Nagra (The Blacklist, ER, Intergalactic, Bend It Like Beckham) is impressive as policewoman D.I Ray. However, the series opener introduces her as Rachita, an everyday citizen scouring the supermarket shelves for her groceries. An elderly white man in beret and spectacles approaches her to ask where the eggs are, accusing “you lot” of confusing him. “But I don’t work here,” she mutters to his back as he resolutely ignores her.
The scene is set. Modern Britain is still a place where antiquated divisions mar the multicultural landscape and old prejudices snap at the ankles of professional women. Only minutes later, Ray defuses a deadly knife incident and is duly celebrated in a ceremony in which most of the uniformed faces are men of all description, but most – significantly – are white.
“What’s your heritage?” asks a superior officer.
Ray avoids a cringe as she responds. She then looks pointedly to the only other Indian face in the room, a barman hired by the catering company. If we’re not already convinced of the unevolved nature of the police force (a theme series creator Maya Sondhi has explored thoroughly in Line of Duty), Ray is handed a lanyard that turns out to show another Indian woman they had on file. Ray’s polite façade is evidently cracking as she waves away apologies to insist that she is provided with a new, the correct one.
Ian Puleston-Davies as Supt Ross Beardsmore, with Parminder Nagra as D.I. Ray. Source: Distributor
Nagra owns the screen. Her face betrays her feelings, and yet, she is eminently professional. She says the right things, resolutely refuses to rise to the provocations of insipid superior officers for whom women – let alone Asian women – are a threat to their hierarchical reign.
The bleakness of the everyday violence and casual, ingrained racism inside and outside the workplace, is a far remove from Bend It Like Beckham. Nagra’s breakthrough role in the movie, an unexpected smash hit almost 20 years ago, saw her breaking the mould of a good South Asian girl to play soccer like her British hero, Beckham. Alongside Keira Knightley, she was captivating: funny, determined, fierce and yet, still, a daughter who wanted to be accepted and approved of.
Since, she’s played a doctor, a senator, a CIA agent, a school counsellor and an intergalactic police marshal.
Still, as she told last year, “I think [executives] know they can’t get away with not being diverse. But I worry that they think, ‘Oh, we need to have this sort of person in here, so we’ll put them in this role’ – to tick a box.”
It is precisely that scenario that plays out in D.I. Ray. She is the tick-box South Asian woman that gives the police force some political credit. Though Ray chafes, she also sees that this is a game she can play her way. Let them tick their boxes, she’s been given a foot in the door and she’s going to kick it wide open and prove she belongs there on merit.
What appears, at first, to be a standard investigation – a “Culturally Specific Homicide”, according to her superiors – unravels into a messy rat’s nest of tangled relationships, corruption and organised crime.
Parminder Nagra as D.I. Ray with Maanuv Thiara as PS Tony Khatri. Source: Distributor
Freshly recruited to her role, Ray would be forgiven for throwing in the towel and heading off to the nearest soccer field, but she is self-assured and emotionally involved. She believes – and of course, we do – that she will make sense of what happened and what is happening minute-by-minute.
“I think some of the most interesting stuff coming out right now is from England. And I’m English! So I want to be a part of that,” Nagra told The Guardian.
Nagra has strong company in the cast of this four-part series. Jamie Bamber (Law & Order: UK, Battlestar Galactica) is her colleague DCI Martyn Hunter; Ian Puleston-Davies (Pennyworth, Tin Star (season 3 of Tin Star is now streaming ) is her boss, Supt Ross Beardsmore; Maanuv Thiara (Ted Lasso) is PS Tony Khatri, a police family liaison officer; Gemma Whelan (Game of Thrones, The Tower, Gentleman Jack) is DCI Kerry Henderson; Peter Bankole (Death in Paradise, Peaky Blinders) is DS Kwesi Edmund; and Ryan McKen (Line of Duty, Temple) is Navin Kapoor, a suspect in a murder case.
D.I. Ray is a thoroughly British cop drama. Like Line of Duty, The Responder and even (remember this?) The Bill, it is aesthetically gritty. The public housing estates loom like greying tombs, the cold and drizzle cast a pallor over everyone’s skin, and the noise is constant: whirring police sirens, screaming kids, shuffling shoes on the pavement, basketballs thwacking, gates clanging.
Jamie Bamber as DCI Martyn Hunter in ‘D.I. Ray’. Source: Distributor
Peter Bankole as DS Kwesi Edmund. Source: HTM
It’s a place where peace scampered for higher ground a long time ago, and D.I. Ray is right at home here. It is the bespectacled grocery shoppers and the sour-faced, high-collared senior sergeants who haven’t accepted that Britain is not the colonial, eggs-on-toast, Brexit idyll of their imaginations.
For fans of Line of Duty and The Responder (starring Martin Freeman, now streaming ), this is going to hit all the right notes as a British cop procedural drama. Nagra is a class act as someone doing her best in a system that repeatedly tries to tell her she is inferior. If that is a relatable experience, Nagra’s D.I. Ray is a reminder we don’t need permission to get on with it and prove our mettle.
Four-part UK series D.I. Ray premiered exclusively in Australia on SBS and SBS On Demand. The full series is now streaming :
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